Antomy of a Flash Animation- con't...

Once you got the guide layer rendered we can start seeing what the other pieces will need to be like. Here's the basic layer I need for the background of the shot. Because the picture came to me with the joystick stations in the front and rear, I needed to first take those into Photoshop and erase them out using a combination clone and lasso tool. The finished base picture looks like this. [Note: You can click on most pictures to enlarge.]

BEFORE

AFTER

Additionally I won't be using the viewscreen from the previous picture in front, but rather in back of the robot fighters, if at all. Since it's only in that one picture, it will be almost impossible to separate it from the robots to make it useable, so I'll end up doing something else. After reading this tutorial you would of course want to make that a separate alpha-channeled layer so that I COULD use it, Right?

Now let's look at rendering the Robots. In the pictures I got from Skyler, all the robots were in psd files and it was easy enough to take out the backgrounds in photoshop. Normally I export all my pieces as png-24 pictures for best reproduction. FLash will publish them as compressed jpegs, so that the import file size is not a problem here. It does however make a difference as to the overall picture size however, so I never save the pieces as bigger than how they will appear in the finished project size, sometimes even a little smaller. Although I would have preferred separate robot pictures, they all came as robot sets (2 in each pic) and had to be separated in photoshop. Several of the robot pictures came as interlocked, and these had to separated carefully and somewhat reworked to make them work in flash. In some cases I had to put another arm or piece on from another render of that robot. Ideally they should have been rendered separately.