Moho Forum

Hey guys- I'm animating a talking character and he will be saying 9 or so different, short phrases. I'm animating each phrase and exporting it as a swf file. There will also be a looping animation for when the character is standing still and not talking.

I have Flash installed on my computer. What I want to do is put all these swf's together in a flash movie so that it starts with the character's "resting" loop, but when a user clicks on him he says the first phrase, then it goes back to the resting loop. They click him again and it goes to the next phrase- and so on. When it gets to the last phrase, it loops back to the first phrase again.

Can this be easily explained how to do? I'm running into problems using movie clips and making them advance to the next frames. I might resort to just putting everything on the main timeline and using actions on the frames.

You really should ask that in a Flash forum.

One of the ways to do this (and the way I would do it) is to put everything into one single movie clip, set markers at the beginning of each part, then write one actionscript which controls the navigation. It's really simple stuff, but I will not teach programming here or do it for you - that's stuff I get paid for!

(OK, free tip: it gets really simple just by naming the markers right, like "loop", "a1", "a2" etc)

thanks- Sorry you're right- I just didn't feel like joining yet another forum. Now let me turn this into a AS question: I think I messed up by doing each animation as separate AS files with separate SWF outputs for each- because FLASH is creating different assets for each SWF, right? I should have done it all as one long AS files, which each phrase in succession, and separated them in FLASH... to keep the file size down.

Any way to fix this without having to animate everything over again? I can import all the AS files into one AS file, but each one will be a separate bone layer each with it's own frames- is there a way to copy actions between layers? So that I can combine it all back into a single character/bone layer?

This highly depends on your character and the amount of animation you're doing. I had the same problem once, years ago, and put everything into one file. Turned out that I just lost any overview after the first thousand frames, and in the meantime bandwidth had improved so much that it wasn't worth the trouble.

- If you have parts of your character that don't move at all, export them only once.
- If you have layers of different pace, like a mouth which moves constantnly, but a head that only turns every few seconds, export them separately. Flash will import any SWF from AS as one layer with a key in every frame even if there's nothing happening. If you keep them separate, you can at least reduce the number of keys in Flash.
- Flash will not recognise that your mouth A in frame 10 is the same mouth A in frame 100, therefore it will create as many symbols as you have frames.

Do some tests first to check wether your file imports at all, and how big it is after exporting from Flash. Then decide how much work you can put into it. It's possible to just import 12 mouth positions, then use the Papagayo file and put the correct phoneme into each frame in Flash by hand.