Sunday, December 27, 2009

Fix for Blurry Flash Using the 3D Transform Tool

About a week ago I had to put together a Flash piece for my company to help demonstrate an idea to our motion graphics person. The idea was simple enough: make an illustration turn a few degrees on the Y-axis and then turn back and make a loop. I imported my illustration to Flash, made my symbol, created the tween and then tweaked the Y-axis. Done and done. Or so I thought.

When testing I was horrified with the results. See for yourself.



My clean illustration had been converted to what looked like a low-res jpg. Definitely not ideal. I tinkered with the Publish settings but came up with the same results again and again. Eventually I turned to Google and discovered a plethora of similar stories...all with the same result as mine...and NO solutions!

How could Adobe allow such a horrible 3D experience? Had they just left something out? Were they afraid of competing with the 3D of After Effects? The Internets were beside themselves. I went forward with the project and turned it in because it really was only an example - not production ready.

Christmas comes. Christmas goes. And then I remembered that I had taught my Flash students how to use the 3D tool last semester and didn't recall any blurry results. I opened that project and sure enough - no blurring or pixelization! So what was different?

Illustrator had been the problem all along


The one common denominator in my testing was Illustrator. The test graphics (and my project graphics) had all been imported from Illustrator. My class project was not. After breaking everything apart (COMMAND-B) that had been imported from Illustrator, copying and then pasting into a NEW symbol the blurry was gone.



This totally fixed my blurry 3D problem in Flash CS4. And it was so simple.

Friday, October 17, 2008

FresnoGRC

Welcome to the first post about the FresnoGRC Website: fresnogrc.org.