Macromedia Flash 4 & 5 Tips - Page 5

Tracing

Trace bitmap

Another great way to work with vectors in Flash is to import a bitmap and trace it. using the Modify>Trace Bitmap command. Like tracing in FreeHand and Adobe Streamline. this reads the colour contours of the bitmap and converts them into curves with Colour fills. You can create some great posterised. Pop Art-style effects, and there are various techniques you can use to make them look individual.

Colour Threshold

Of course, doing this involves numerous settings controlling how Flash reads and translates the pixels into curves. In short, Color Threshold sets the colour difference determining a different vector shape, and Minimum Area is of course the minimum size of anew vector shape. Curve Fit and Corner Threshold control the accuracy of the resulting vector curves.

File sizes

Tracing is often a great technique to use if you have a bitmap that you want to tween and animate, or if you want to keep the file size down. But take care - if you set the Colour Threshold and Are( too low, or the accuracy too high, the resulting curves could be so complex that the maths takes up more bytes thar the bitmap pixels.