Re: Haring <Freehand Morphs>

[John Dowdell]

At 7:45 PM 3/4/98, Daniel Wiener wrote:

>The morphs were created in Illustrator, not by me but by one of my

>colleagues.  They are mostly done by hand, slowly figuring out where best

>to move the anchor points thrpugh trial and error, with some help from the

>blend tool.


Good God, man! Why, in a civilized society such things would not be

sanctioned...! <g>


Seriously, you achieved a great effect, but the terms "blending" and

"Illustrator" don't really go well together. Seeing the result makes me

appreciate the effort all the more (but psst, you can get further, faster,

by using a different precision vector tool in conjunction with Flash).

</shill>


(btw, we had a big discussion in tech support yesterday on your site...

lots of folks here were very glad to see it, thanks.)




At 11:42 PM 3/4/98, Seven2000 wrote:

>I haven't seen a lot of people using morphs in Flash.  It's nice to see it

>done so well, but I'm curious WHY I don't see a lot of it.  Is anyone using

>the Freehand xtra to create morphs for Flash animations?


One reason may be is that the Animation PowerPack Xtra came out just a few

months ago, and FreeHand 8 has only been available for about two weeks now.

(The Xtra was released ahead of the rest of FH8 for those who needed the

feature immediately.) It usually takes a bit of time for new design

possibilities to be explored and percolate around through various heads.


For shape-morphs themselves, note that this is currently on the

kilobyte-heavy size. FreeHand exports each step in the blend as a new

curve, and then we're essentially page-flipping in Flash among these

various shapes. This is unlike Flash's own native animation, where we can

rotate or scale or transform a given curve. Unfortunately Flash doesn't

have a way to describe changes to a shape's curves over time, though.


Anyway, shape-morphs are a little expensive to download right now. If there

was a more economical way to store them then that would surely be fun....




At 2:36 AM 3/5/98, Willem Mulder wrote:

>I too am very interested in this topic - Our company is considering

>purchasing Freehand towards this end... I wonder if these animation

>capabilities will be taken up by either Flash's or Illustrators descendants?


I'm not sure of what you're seeking. I do know that, even aside from shape

changes, a capable drawing tool can help extend the range of shapes you can

use in Flash. For instance, those radial-lines that you see everywhere

these days are painstaking to create in Flash, yet a snap in FreeHand...

just draw a line, mirror it into an array, then use 3D-perspective on the

group. Precision typography or blends-on-a-path or intersections and

compounds or cross-hatching are all much easier to do in FreeHand than

Flash. FreeHand 8 will save out in editable .SWF which you can easily merge

into your other work.


Shape-morphs are one of the easiest-to-see advantages of using a drawing

tool, but their current execution does exact a cost in filesize. Plenty of

other reasons to use both types of tools, though... broadens the palette of

what you can do in Flash.


jd






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