Designing New site and worried about Animation and LImitations

[TomTriffic]

Hello all, I am a freelance artist as well as working for comcast's internet tech support. I actually went to college for computer animation in which I do most of my work in max and Animation Master ,I also love 2d Animation and Image manipulation.
I am new to flash and currently going through Hillman Curtis' book."Flash Web Design" I have some really vivid ideas for what I would like to do in Flash for my site but I want it to be realistic and not a painful download for viewers. Now my love is in character animation and I was wondering if there is a way to take my characters I created in Max and animated with Character Studio into Flash via Swift 3d or another program and actually have a fluid look.I ask this because I have an intro in mind and am going to animate it in either 3d or 2d but most 3d Ive senn in Flash has been extremely simple and wonder if it's because of difficulty or the fact that the file will be too large. And I assume its best to use the frames one at a time and not prerender it out into a movie. Also with 2d animation do most just scan in pencil tests and clean up in PS and then bring items in a drawing at a time...
I am working on my businesses new site and want to make it COOL but also not annoying because of download times,so any tips regarding shortening animations by importing different ways is appreciated.
Thanks in advance

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Tom

[TiMuN]

Hi Tom ..

I've seen a test in CNet, comparing Vecta 3d and Swift 3d, the two tools you should use to accomplish this (there is another one called illustrate! i think) ...

As far as it goes, it seems Swift 3d has much better representation, compression, and an astonishing shadow rendering capabilities for flash, and i would go for that if i were in your shoes.

But you would just have to try it .. if your 3d characters are too detailed (you know about the polygon matters), the rendering into a swf file would weight too much to do a Toy Story Flash version ...

Anyway .. i tend to think a 1Mb flash site has to be a MUST SEE .. not always, thou ..

best regards.
TiMuN