How to make an SWF file?

# 1 20-09-2006 , 04:09 PM

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As a brandnewbie, I'm thinking simplistically I know. But it seems like I should be able to create a simple animation and somehow get it into an swf file for my website.

Is Maya used for website content? If so what is the best path for generating short clips or amimated gif's or anything?

Any information or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Harley

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# 2 20-09-2006 , 06:23 PM

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Welcome Harley,

Its quite an open ended question? The shaockwave exporter supplied with Maya is really to get assets into Macromedia/Adobe Director.

If your looking for simple animations, then look at the F1 help files and there are tutorials on how to render your animations. Normal practice would be to create your scene and have your animation 100% ready. Do a batch render and render out all the frames of your animation and use a 3rd party App like Quicktime Pro to create your movie file from the image sequence generate by Maya.

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# 3 21-09-2006 , 09:26 AM

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So there's no way to create an swf file automatically? What about any kind of movie format. I think I'm missing something basic. What is Maya used for if you can't make a movie except frame by frame?

Harley

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# 4 21-09-2006 , 09:33 AM

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All movies are rendered on a frame by frame basis. You effectively render out each individual frame as a still, then 'stitch' them back together in a software like VideoMach etc, to create your final output be it avi, wmv etc.

If you believe in telekinesis, raise my right hand.

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# 5 21-09-2006 , 12:09 PM

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What he said...

Thats why studios have render farms. These giant collection of dedicated rendering workstations run in conjunction with each other to render out masses of images for compositing and final creation of a movie.

Check out Finding Nemo extras DVD to see the scale of this type of operation, it took nearly a year to render the full movie.

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Last edited by R@nSiD; 21-09-2006 at 12:51 PM.

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# 6 22-09-2006 , 07:14 AM

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Thanks for your replies. I see now that rendering is a separate process not to be taken lightly.
However, for web content there must be a better way. If you look at the flash templates for websites, many of them have 3d effects. I've modified several of these for flash intro's. The graphics had to be from a movie clip. Right now I'm using PlayBlast to make a clip, but it seems like there should be a better way to do this than grabbing frames from my screen!

So I'll ask again - Is anyone using Maya for web content???

Harley

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# 7 22-09-2006 , 07:41 AM

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i believe for the 3d you see in many flash animations they're using flash-related plugins such as Swift 3D and the like... you could, however, take a short image sequence, turn it into a .gif file using adobe imageready, and then import that into your own flash file (if you have flash)... then you can do whatever you like with it - turn it into a link, an object with scripts applied as a trigger for other animation/sound, etc.

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# 8 22-09-2006 , 10:24 AM

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What you are looking to do is not impossible, but try exporting to swf and importing the finished file into Flash. This should be do able.

In fact let me give it a whirl... I'll get back to you soon.

Back now...

OK this exporter is only for use with Director. So render as normal use videomach (or similar), I use quicktime Pro, and open the image sequence save your movie as a mov file and import it onto the library that way. there appears to be no way to export directly to flash from maya, it seems.

Chris (formerly R@nSiD)
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Last edited by R@nSiD; 22-09-2006 at 11:07 AM.

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