July 18, 1999

Keeping FreeHand Layers in Flash v3-4

FreeHand 7 and 8 have always been compatible when copying and pasting objects into Flash. Introduced in FreeHand 8, was the ability to animate layers (see Creating a Simple Flash Animation in the Tips Archive) and export as a Flash movie. Now in Flash 5, you can import layers fine, but not for older versions of Flash.

Below I describe how easy it is to retain layer info when working from a FreeHand document in Flash using text as an example.

Version: 7 and above

  
 

In this example, I'll be using some type attached to a path as shown above. You can really use anything for this operation, but this is a great way of animating special things like Text on Paths that you couldn't do in Flash.

 

While the text is selected I simply do the Xtras -> Animate -> Release to Layers operation. This converts the text to path automatically and places each letter on a separate layer. Of course with more letters or objects, you could have an extremely long list of layers to work with, so think ahead.

 

Now if you were to Export this as a regular Flash movie, you would make sure that the option Animate layers was turned on.

In Flash 5, you would import this and have it convert your layers to Frames.

 

When imported into Flash however, all the objects will be in separate frames creating the animation you see above. This may be what you want, but for this example, is not how I want the text to "animate"

 

The trick to keeping a FreeHand's layers in Flash is by exporting as an Adobe Illustrator™ 7.x format. So I go back to my original document and export the file to this format.

When imported into Flash, all layers are retained and each part of the text is on it's own layer like shown above. Even the Guides and Background layers are imported.

 

For the effect I wanted, I had to "stair step" each of the layers so that each letter would appear after the other.

This created the effect I wanted as shown in the animation above. Fast, effective and easy. Note the significant color shifting with the Adobe Illustrator™ format. This can be solved by further editing of the Flash movie.

This method is best only when animating simple groups of objects. When exporting a file with gradients using the Illustrator format, will yield multiple fills to emulate the gradient and as you saw above, major color shifting. For more accurate gradients and colors, it's still best to export as a Flash movie from FreeHand.   image