Hey there, new to this board. I currently work for a company where we have been creating basic animations in Flash using imported Illustrator art (making the transition from print to digital for educational products). Hence, we are only familiar with adding interactivity in Flash via Action Script. Mostly basic interactivity(i.e., rollover buttons) but some educational games as well. We thought Animate Pro might give us a better quality of animation and be more efficient in the process BUT our concern is whether there are limitations to interactivity allowed when exported as a SWF into Flash. Can anyone give feedback on your experience adding interactivity to animations created in Animate Pro using Flash? Thank you!
It highly depends on what you want to do. If you look at it from an asset-type workflow it will certainly be possible (very similar how you would work for a sprite based game). Having your character doing one thing in one swf and another thing in the next swf and swapping between those swfs by opening them through action script or importing them into Flash should work perfectly fine (some postpro modules don’t work in swfs though, but even animation done with complex character rigs still look the same - I just tested).However the imported swfs are a mess if you actually go into their symbol - the layer structure can come out pretty wild and everything is wrapped as drawing objects. You should not have to work inside whatever you exported, but working and scripting with the whole object and around it is no problem. So for example if you want to make something clickable that a character picks up and moves around you should export the character and the clickable thing in two seperate swfs so you don’t have to click through Animate Pro’s swf symbols.In conclusion: You probably can’t layout the whole Flash application in Animate Pro, import the swf and just make a few things clickable. However if you want an asset based workflow, use Animate Pro to build up an animation library and you are aware that you would have to work out hybrid solutions for complex dynamic elements where some stuff is provided by Animate and some by Flash (like you would have to for dynamic lipsync) Animate Pro would be a very powerful tool for your workflow.
Thanks for the response- very helpful. I was wondering on the modules, which ones don’t carry over in SWF’s. Are their specific modules that do not come through a SWF to Flash as is? I did read elsewhere that some effects may not translate correctly in a SWF when brought into Flash to add interactivity. Just looking for specifics on which modules can be problematic when bringing over into Flash to add interactivity. Thanks!
When do you the export to SWF, it should pop up a warning letting you know which ones don’t export correctly. Does that help at all?
I can also double-check if it’s in the documentation.
~Lilly