I'm trying to get a Flash animation out of LightWave 3D and it was suggested to use Illustrator as the "middle man". Essentially as a test I did a 360 spin of this teddy bear object and rendered with cel-shading.
<http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s136/willohmsford/teddy_test_01.jpg?t=1227142675>

Then the idea was to load the image sequence into Illustrator as layers, trace them, then export it as a SWF animation.

My problem is how to load 120 images in as layers. Of course 120 is just he test, the real project may be a lot longer. Would be a great bonus if I could trace all layers at once. Any thoughts on this?

Would be a great bonus if I could trace all layers at once. Any thoughts
on this?




Put each image on its own layer, convert each to Live Trace. Find an appropriate setting, then apply that to each image. You're going to get a pretty big SWF, I think, since each frame will be all new shapes.

Hey Phil,
Good to see you over here on this forum.
Anyway I been playing with this some more, and I found that if you multi-select images in Bridge and use file>place>in illustrator. that all images will be place in the same document on their own layer.
Good Luck

I haven't tested the Bridge solution Silkrooster suggested, but there are always the Release to Layers commands in the Flyout menu of the Layers Palette. That should work for you.

Perhaps you'd then have to convert the resulting bunch of sublayers to main layers (select the sub layers and drag them on top of the main layer's entrance).

Great, Silk thanks for the tip! And thank you too Kurt.

Well the Tracing in Bridge technique isn't working. Even when I pick the preset I made earlier, it just converts them all to a solid black rectangle (well most, others give an error). it also wouldn't even try to do it with TGA files, I had to convert them all to JPEG first. Guess I'll have to bring them into Illustrator and do it manually.

On my test, I had an issue with TGA's as well. But seamed to work fine with PSD's.

OK so I've got my teddy bear animation, but there appears to be a gap, maybe 1 pixel wide or less that appears around the edges of colors. Any thoughts on how to get rid of it?

<http://www.philnolan3d.com/misc/teddy_test_02.swf>

Interesting, looks like the two objects don't quite mate with each other. Some ideas:
* Add a background object that will cover the offending area using one of the two colors.
* Add a stroke to one of the two colors
* See what overprint will do. ctrl-f11

What would have been better is having the bear as one layer and the highlight as a separate layer rather than cutting out a portion of the bear for the highlight. Probably the easiest and most time consuming way to do that is do an additional render in LW without the highlights. Then in photoshop to could use a difference blend mode to create a highlight sequence(after effects would probably be easier for sequences) Now do live trace of the bear and a live trace of the highlight. You should then be able to import the bear as one layer in flash and the highlight as another layer. As I said time consuming and no guarantees.
Good luck...

Thanks I don't know anything about Flash since version 4, I sent this to the client and now he's thinking it might be easier to do 3D objects anyway, instead of cel-shaded.I'm not sure how possible it is to do that in a web based game though. I told him it all depends on what the guy making the game needs. It might also be possible to just render arms, legs, torso, etc as separate pieces and then the game guy can animate them. Or who knows maybe it's just one still image that slides onto the screen.