Newbie Illustrator needing help getting a self-initiated project off the ground

[RoboStef]

Hi guys,

I'm new to the forum and indeed to Flash. I'm an illustrator & designer and I don't have any coding knowledge as such, but I'm trying to make an illustration of mine interactive and I'd really appreciate some help from any of you that have time.

To give you an idea of what I'm working on here is a screenshot of a section I just took:
http://cl.ly/image/1S3u3P0l2y0A

It's basically a big machine and the intention is to have it be interactive so all the little buttons can be clicked and various animations will occur; cogs turn, lights flash etc.

To fit the deliberately loose and 'naive' art direction I plan on having a fairly crude animation style involving a handful of frames of transparent pngs for each action. You can also just about notice there is a 3 layer parallax effect I hope to implement. These are things I'm hoping that with trial and error and by doing lots of reading I will be able to achieve, but before I can do that I am unsure about how to set the canvas up and get started.

My aim is to have the machine several times larger than your browser window and the user navigates around it by moving their cursor to the edge of the screen. The screenshot above is zoomed out to give you an idea of the size, I actually want the viewer to be closer in (you'd see about half as much of the machine as this at any time). It would be fantastic if I was able to include a zoom out function at some stage so the user could view the whole machine but that's not a priority at this stage.

So I guess my first problem/question is how do i approach this? What size and resolution do I create it? Are there any tutorials that you think match what I'm trying to achieve here that I should check out?

As happens with most creative projects the longer I've been working on this the more ideas have popped into my head and the more ambitious it has become in scope. Any thoughts on whether this is too complex for a complete beginner or how I could make things better would be greatly received.


Thanks for reading

[Nig 13]

It could've worked out for you, until you mentioned the zooming function. This is way beyond for someone as new to Flash as you, so I suggest you only have the Stage as big as the image itself (full view), learn about Buttons, Movieclips, Timeline and Frames, simple coding to go to other frames and simple buttons clicks, and then try to make this interactive with as little coding as possible, so it doesn't get too complicated for you.

Thing is, people with your ambition don't have patience, they just wanna jump right into Flash to create what they want, but it's not that simple, and I know that because I've experienced this kind of feeling to (not with Flash, but for example with Java). It may sound boring, but practice is the only solution. Try simple tutorials on the internet and start on something smaller, and when you've had enough experience, jump back to this project with new knowledge and laugh at yourself for not being able to pull it off before

I'm sorry, but I really have too much to do right now, so I won't be able to assist you with this project. Hopefully you'll take my advice and start slow and easy before working on this beast.