Hey Everyone, Just to preface this, I am not an artist, I can''t draw worth a damn, and I will NEVER be an artist. I''m a writer, and I''m a member of Landfish (a game development group...check out the Game Design forum is you haven''t seen us in action yet...) That said, my current job is doing research for one of our new artists. We''re currently working on a game in which we have a 10-20 second animated cut-scene in between each "level," in a 2D, cartoon-like style. Our cut-scene artist is VERY skilled in hand-drawn animation and has also used Flash 4.0 to some extent, but other than that he has no background in animation on computers. He uses a PC, and right now we''re looking for ANY program that would either a) allow him to convert Flash''s .swf files into MPEGs, or b) provide a development environment for him to create MPEGs directly. I''ve attempted to do a bit of research but have come up empty-handed, and would REALLY appreciate it if anyone could at least point us in the right direction. Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide! -Matt --Don''t take me too seriously...apparently everyone thinks my mom is hot. *sigh*

Well.. Avid Technologies (the makers of Softimage) have a nifty little program called Softimage|Toonz. It''s a 2D cell animation program. Check it out at:

http://www.softimage.com/default.asp?url=/Products/Toonz/ARCHIVE/default.htm

Not sure if it''ll fit your budget, but it should do the trick.

There''s some other ways of doing it, possibly cheaper. Like taking snaps of each cell in the traditional way, but instead of landing it on film, put it on your harddrive. Once there, import them into After Effects as a sequence. Then, make a movie in the .mpeg format. Tada!

Scanning each cell is another possibility, but that''ll take a while and each cell needs to be placed exactly or the animation will be all jumpity. That''s true about taking digital pictures also, I guess.

Depending on how 3D savvy your artist is, you could do all the animation and modeling in a 3D package and use a Toon Shader as a post-render effect (Softimage has one, so does Maya. Not sure about 3DS Max, but it''s probably out there.).

There are some other workstation/software packages out there that I''ve seen, but those cost in the $25,000 range.

As for converting each .swf files, just export the movie (File>Export Movie), set the output as a JPEG sequence, save it, then import that into After Effects and create the .mpeg there.

Flash 4 does allow you to create .mov and .avi files, as well as bitmap sequences and .gif sequences (and a few other obscure file formats), so you''ve got plenty of options.

Hope this helped!

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Monkey eat deadCricket, checkmate!