Now you are ready to bring your 3D star animation back into Flash. You will want to import it as an image sequence:
Create a new Flash file called star_animation.fla and create a new movie clip by choosing Insert > New Symbol.
In the Create New Symbol dialog box, set the Type to Movie Clip and name it StarAnimation. Click OK to close the dialog box.
Choose File > Import > Import to Stage.
Select the first PNG file in the sequence you just exported. It should be named Comp 1 01.png. Flash will detect that the image is part of a sequence. Click Yes to import the images as a sequence in the Timeline.
Drag your movie clip to the Stage (see Figure 7).
Figure 7. Animation sequence imported into Flash
To give it even more of 3D look, apply Drop Shadow filter by clicking the plus icon in the Filters panel.
Set the Blur x and Blur y of the star movie clip to 30.
Set the color of the shadow to black with 35% alpha value.
Set the angle of the shadow to 90 and its distance to 50.
Have fun with this. For example, you could create two other star animations with different size and filter effect settings, and resize the document file to accommodate all three stars (see Figure 8).
Figure 8. Three animated stars in Flash
The star_animation.swf demo file contained in the sample ZIP linked to at the beginning of the article shows the final animation of the star with the 3D properties applied.
Article Series
This article is part 7 of a 7 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:
