simple shapes from complex brushes

[mgeduld]

Hi. Forgive me if this has been covered before, but I have a question about brushes. As you can see from the test below, I have created a multi-colored brush and added some rotation and tight spacing.

Ultimately, I want to move my brushstroke (center object) into Flash. And I need to simplify the shapes as much as possible to optimize my Flash file.

My brushstroke has many unwanted vector objects in it. I only want to export the parts of the brushstroke that show -- not all the parts that are unseen (because they are behind the visible parts).

Can anyone think of a way to do this? I've tried Convert Line to Editable Shape, and then ungrouping and adding shapes. But it's impossible to select just the shapes I want to add together.

I finally restored to tracing over each "shape" in the brushstroke with the pen tool and creating a new shape (i.e. the little guy on the right). But this is time-consuming.

The only other solution I could come up with was to convert the whole thing into a bitmap and then to trace the bitmap, but I couldn't get the trace options to produce anything that looked good.

Am I missing something?

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }

[mgeduld]

Hi. Forgive me if this has been covered before, but I have a question about brushes. As you can see from the test below, I have created a multi-colored brush and added some rotation and tight spacing.

Ultimately, I want to move my brushstroke (center object) into Flash. And I need to simplify the shapes as much as possible to optimize my Flash file.

My brushstroke has many unwanted vector objects in it. I only want to export the parts of the brushstroke that show -- not all the parts that are unseen (because they are behind the visible parts).

Can anyone think of a way to do this? I've tried Convert Line to Editable Shape, and then ungrouping and adding shapes. But it's impossible to select just the shapes I want to add together.

I finally restored to tracing over each "shape" in the brushstroke with the pen tool and creating a new shape (i.e. the little guy on the right). But this is time-consuming.

The only other solution I could come up with was to convert the whole thing into a bitmap and then to trace the bitmap, but I couldn't get the trace options to produce anything that looked good.

Am I missing something?

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }

[Big Frank]

Perhaps you could get your little Green DinoSaur to do it for you whilst you sleep. He seems to be a clever little chap.

Very sneaky, that DinoCam, had me fooled for a cool 60 seconds! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img] Rename dinocam.html to index.html and you'll fool more people more of the time! [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

--
Big Frank was
http://www.wognum.org/files/madewithxarax.gif

[Clements]

Would selecting the entire stroke (all its component shapes) and converting into one bitmap work? ... oops now I see you've already considered this.

OR, if you need to animate the stroke itself, then export a vector of just the object you traced on the right, import it into Flash, create a symbol from it using the necessary colors, then tween the symbols ... or tween a portion of the animation using the symbols, create of movie of the animation segment, then use mulitple copies of the movie?

[Egg Bramhill]

That's some sick dino!

If you draw the brush stroke, select it, and arrange / convert line to shape it will import to Flash.

However I ended up with 774 objects on a simlar brush stroke as yours. The .swf file size was 38Kb
whilst a simliar gif gave a .swf file size of 3Kb.

As you say, if there was a way of selecting the upper "visible" shapes of one colour and adding shapes this would dramatically reduce file size, but I don't know of anyway of doing it.

I even used named colours in the original brush shapes, but unfortunately these become local fill colours in the brush (as far as the named colour gallery is concerned). I exported these as an .eps file and changed the local fill colours with named colours doing a search and replace in a text document. It worked in as much as you could then select all colours of one kind, but unfortunately it still selects all those colours wether there in front or behind.

I suggest hand tracing may be your only option if you want to keep it as a vector. Otherwise you could convert each shape iteration into a gif.

Egg

[Ross Macintosh]

Marcus - Is the green circle really necessary? Why not eliminate it from the brush and then only add one at the end where you see it.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[mgeduld]

Thanks, guys. I had a feeling there wasn't any easy answer. Too bad, because it rules out using brushes with Flash -- if you care about file size.

Ross, I agree that the green shape isn't necessary. I should have added earlier that the pic I posted was just an example of the problem I keep running into. I didn't actually want to move that brushstroke into Flash. Just similar ones.

My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, my brother thanks you -- and my litte green dinosaur thanks you!

Marcus Geduld
{ email me } { visit me }