Do you guys ever use sequential .bmp's instead of vectors for Flash 3d?

[caseywhitcher]

Hey guys, I'm wondering if there would be a dissadvantage to using some sequenced .bmps in an animation instead of rendering out the vectors ?

anyone ever do this?

advantages?

disadvantages?

[Hippyscum]

disadvantage: wayy bigger

take compressed .jpg's instead

[Daniellawson]

Really depends upon how big the animation is. Rendering a sequence of bmp's is going to create a large file size whereas using vectors can be scaleable and still pretty low file size.

Swift 3d does both of these things renders to vector (but doesnt look as smooth or real as bmp) and it can also render out in a sequence of bmp's into one file (But the bmp's lose quality when scaled)

So as i said before it all depends on what type of animation you are doing?

[caseywhitcher]

When I said sequential .bmps I was talking about importing them into flash that way, flash will obviously compress them to .jpgs on export.

I was making some renders this weekend of some dental devices using a dental teeth and mouth model, there was alot of geometry involved, it seemed like the vector output I was getting was huge, I ended up going to .bmps that I then had flash compress with the rest of the movie, I think the results look good, definately more detailed, but I'm wondering why I don't see more people doing it that way?

[gerbick]

yes, and even used jpg's/png's... and it was HUGE!!

better to optimize the files going in... the jpg compression you talk of is not as effective as say, Fireworks or Photoshop.

[BlinkOk]

sometimes a combination of bitmap and vector can produce the best result.

[caseywhitcher]

for this recent project, I used a couple wireframe spinning outlines in vector, but for most of the complex animations I did bmps cuz the vector fills were larger files than the .jps (from .bmps) were.

[BlinkOk]

are you using mesh gradient fills?

[RUSHVision]

Once you reach a certain level of complexity, vector output will be larger than raster output. Which one you use will really depend on the content/complexity of your scene.