symbol placing? looking for a faster method.

[paperjunkie]

ello ello. I'm new to flash and I was wondering if there is a faster was to accurately place a symbol on the stage.

I was trying to make a simple animation of zero standing in place and doing 5 slashes. I had to place each symbol by hand and adjusting with the arrow keys. I must have gone wrong somewhere because some of the frames are a little shaky. The ruler and guides helped to accurately place some of the symbols, but its really strikes me as a flawed system to do this manually as it leaves too much room for human error.

Each symbol is of a different size to I cant just enter coordinates to place them. I tried to change the registration point, but didn't really do much good. Maybe I was approaching that method wrong, I dunno.

I think re-ripping the sprites off the sheet and making them all the same dimensions might help, but that means scrapping half my work. Is there a better way to put symbols quickly and accuratly on the stage without having to re-rip them?

[viruszero]

Thats probably the fastest way actually... It does take alot of time to get used to doing it though, try enabling the onionskin (one of the buttons just under the time line. I think it's the first button, but I'm not 100% sure, but it is there.) so you can see where the previous sprite lines up underneath it.

Though if you plan on using those sprites alot, you may just want to put them all into a movie clip so you can later just insert instances of that movie clip.

[paperjunkie]

Hmm, I never thought to use onion skinning. Would I be able to snap the symbol onto the shadow? It does sound like it would help move things along faster, but it sounds like a slight step up from rulers/guides.

As for the movie clip suggestion, I'm not sure how to do that yet. I'm completely in the dark on how that works. =(.

[viruszero]

You'll still want to use the rules and guides to help align the sprites, but having the onionskin can help a bit more.

When I do animation, What I do is:
1- import the entire sprite sheet
2- trace the spritesheet (Bitmap trace, it's in one of the menus, i can't remember right now)
3- click on the background and press the delete button
4- highlight the sprites and then right click on them and choose cut from the property menu
5- press [ctrl+F8 (insert new symbol... Atleast I think that's the right command, well you can check it by looking through the menus until you see it.) or go to the insert menu at the top and choose insert new symbol. ] and choose either movie clip or graphic and give it a a name corresponding to the sprites then click ok
6- then flash puts you inside that clip, I press paste (Ctrl + V) and then I clcik on the name of the scene at the top of the timeline to get out of that movieclip/graphic
7- I repeat the procedure for every set of sprites (IE- walking sprites, jumping, shooting, dashing etc..)

[paperjunkie]

I'm not familiar with the trace bitmap function, what does it do exactly? I tried messing around with it for a little while and it seemed to just smoothen out the pixels and convert them into fills I think. I dunno, maybe i haven't played around with it enough.

Also my method of ripping seems to have a huge hole in it, but I don't know if this is normal.

I rip sprites with Photoshop and Imageready to save onto a .gif with a transparent background. Then I import them all into the library. They go into the library as bitmap. Then I convert all bitmaps into symbols. This to me, seems like a bad use of time since it's such a tedious and repetitive process.

Is there a way to convert them into a symbol as its being imported?

This is going a little off topic, sorry. But, I'd rather not make a new thread as that just seems somewhat unnecessary.

[viruszero]

The trace bitmap function converts a sprite from pixels to a more animated look. But it allows you select individual sprites from an entire sheet to cut/paste use as you wish. This cuts down on the amount of stuff you have to import to the library.

As far as saving to .gif... what type of files were they before?
And are you importing them one at a time? (like take one walking sprite at a time, saving, converting importing and converting again? then repeating it for every other sprite as well?)
because flash recognises .png and .gif as default. (So you can just import them right to flash and then trace them to get rid of any backgrounds...)

[paperjunkie]

The sprite sheets prior to ripping are still gifs with transparent backgrounds. I would spend a couple minutes ripping an entire set of sprites such as zero running. After I finish ripping all the sprites, I would mass import them.

After that though, I'm stuck converting one at a time.

Also, when I delete the original bitmap off the library, the image of the symbol disappears. Is that normal? This is probably not good that I have to keep the original bitmap as that doubles the size of my library possibly slowing down any loading time should I ever decide to upload these anywhere.

i86.photobucket.com/albums/k105/PaperJunkie/5hitcombo.swf
Looks a little shaky. This was before I tried using onion skinning. I'll give that a shot now.

[viruszero]

That's actually not bad as far as shakyness goes, there is a tolerance to it, some shakyness you can't get out simply because it's inherent to the sprites. (Such as the way the sprite is supposed to look when moving.)

But the reason it disappears is because when you use symbols, they still rely on the bitmaps to exist... So remove the bitmaps and the symbols have nothing to reference...

Which is why I suggest experimenting with the import whole unaltered sprite sheets and using the trace bitmap feature. It cuts the amount of stuff in your library to a much more manageable level. (Also, if your not already doing it, in the library panel you may want to create more folders to store stuff, so you can name them and know exactly whats in each folder without having to go through the entire folder.)

[paperjunkie]

Library size is a major concern of mine now. Would importing the entire sheet rather then each individual sprite reduce the library in size? The way I see it is that, pixel count is still the same, but I dunno.

[viruszero]

it does reduce size, because when you import them individually and convert them your effectively doubling the size. And that eally starts to add up hen you import many sprite sheets.

However, sprite sheets themselves are small compared to music, so if your only using 2-5 different spritesheets and not too many backgrounds, then don't worry about it so much. But if you start using more than 5 different full sprite sheets and over 7 different backgrounds or rapidly changing backgrounds with many effects then you will want to worry about size a bit more.
And sprites are the hardest thing to modify to reduce size without messing up... Music you can always cut it down to just what you need and compress it massively wihout making it sound too bad.