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Thread: Handling Maya animations in Flash

  1. #1
    Junior Member
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    Handling Maya animations in Flash

    I'm hoping some of you guys have run into this already . . . if so:

    I have exported a series of 5, 40-frame animations from Maya as a series of PNGs. I'd like to handle the individual animations (interactivity) in Flash.

    I can import them into flash but the file size is huge. I know, I can't have it both ways--either it'll be high quality and huge file size, or less quality for a smaller file size. Is there a happy medium, or a trick any of you know of?

    I've tried converting them into an .AVI (then into an .FLV), but the image quality ends up being crap before I even get to converting it to an .FLV, even with the settings cranked up to highest quality. And, of course, I still end up with an enormous file size. Compressing it with Sorenson isn't a bad option when you're starting with something that's already good quality, but if the AVI I'm starting with is low quality, Sorenson just makes it worse.

    I've seen sites that utilize incredible 3D animations in Flash. They don't seem to take all day loading. What am I missing?

  2. #2
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    what´s the resolution?,- some sites that are done very well delete every frame that doesn´t make a difference so they use for example piour frames for backwards motions ect.
    Also it makes sence to crop the are to it´s minimum active area,- everything else can be solved with just 1 general background image below the cropped frames above it.

    Persoanlly I dont like very much FLV or flash Video compression for smaler stuff like in your example just 40 frames- because it usually looks jaggy.

    Just on a sidenote: adobe has included h264 aka MPEG4 support in the beta flash player so in future you can even dynamicly load or stream MPEG4 compressed media wich is a compression standard used today on BluRay and HDdvd. but like I said still beta

  3. #3
    Senior Member RUSHVision's Avatar
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    If there is any transparency in your images then that is going to significantly increase the file size. If there is any way you can render over a solid background that would help. The dimensions you are working with will make a big difference as well.
    mrush


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  4. #4
    Senior Member da_hammer's Avatar
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    One alternate method / cumbersome process:

    Render your animation as *.mov (e.g.: 100 frame sequence)

    Import your *.mov into Adobe Image Ready and while before it opening choose frame optimization in the dialog box, you can restrict your animation to just 20 frames if you want, i.e. 1:5 compression, but before exporting as a PNG sequence or to your same *.mov format, better preview your end result, on how your animation will look. Safe, i tried in few of my projects and it worked out well.

  5. #5
    supervillain gerbick's Avatar
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    From what I remember (I'm not a Maya user any longer) Maya 5 and above - non-PLE versions - support rendering to *.swf, right? You'd be creating *.swf's and making them into movieClips and use ActionScript to control those movies - when they're triggered, how they string together, onClick, et al.

    Why not render out to a *.swf and do the above instead? I know that rendering out *.png files might look the best and as you know that the movie size bloats up real quick. Also, be careful not to render above 24 fps. A lot of times, the stuff we see on the web is about 16-20 fps. Anything lower and it's noticeable, anything higher and it's unnecessary. Just a slightly different thought/approach.

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