PhotoPainter transparency export, Flash masking dillema

talk design
1

I just exported a transparent gif file from Corel PhotoPainter, imported the image to flash and applied it as a mask.

The problem: the image won’t mask using its shape, instead the mask just uses a square in roughly the same size as the image.

I’m stuck, I need help.

2

Did not understand your story that good but:

If you have Flash 8 you can us the bitmapData class to make alphamasks.
In older flash versions you will always see those boxxes…

What you could do is make a mask thats as big as your gif.
Then in a layer on top of that you place jour gif. :wink:

3

I guess I might have been a little stingy with my words.

What I meant by transparent gif was that the the background is the part which is trasparent.
I was planning on using the gif’s outline in my flash animation but Flash keeps turning it into a square.

4

try exporting to an PNG :wink:

5

That was a good idea, I should have thought of that.

Unfortunately it didn’t work. It turns out PhotoPainter can only export images with transparent background on a gif file.
I’m starting to think PhotoPainter and Flash weren’t built for each other.

6

why do you think all the cool people use good programs like photoshop or fireworks

7

It turns out that flash can only mask using the dimensions of the object meaning a raster file (whose dimensions are basically that of the stage used and a stage is always a square or rectangle) will not mask using the outline of the drawing even if the background is set to transparent.

I figured this out when I used other programs to export my files and thought you guys might wanna know.

In any case I think I must make a vector illustration of the shape I want to use as a mask… which is pretty tough.

8

or you could just do the entire image mask and all in whatever program you use and export that as a regular jpg and use that in your flash, no masks required…

9

I’ve also encountered this problem. What I do is: take you mask image and put a solid color overlay on it, then export as PNG, and import that into flash. The apply a Trace Bitmap with settings 10, 1, pixels, many corners, and use that as a mask.

10

but he cant export pngs with the program he uses

11

I wanted to animate the image to be masked on so… :sigh:

12

Oh, well it should work with GIF or any format that uses transparencies.

13

BlueNar it bloody worked!:beam:!!! Thanks mates!!!:party:

It turned out Bitmap Tracing works on gif as well!

14

No prob :slight_smile: The trace is quite useful but I only use it for solid color shapes. Anything else kills my computer when I run it.