Max to Flash

[Leo73]

With the debut of max 5 there is also a program called Plasma by Discreet. You can open your max files in there and render them out as .swf files and then just import them into Flash. I have used it a couple of times but have not yet mastered it.

Hope this helps.

[slayerment]

for right now, i would say render out a jpg sequence and just make that a movie clip in flash or something. it might be large file size, but its worth it if what ur seeing is pretty 3d.

[Fozzie]

Look for the "Web Enhancement" set of plugins on Discreets site for Max R4/R5 this will give you a shockwave W3D exporter and Vecta 3D version 1.1 (plus a few other 3d on the web formats).

Foz

[Xilica]

NICE!

So my sweet animations could look really tite on webpages. I'm going to look into it.

[dvornik]

Be advised that the plugins (vecta3d, illustrate) will generate gigantic frame-by-frame swf files and making a long animation like that is rather unpractical. It usually makes more sense if you reuse you short MCs for some fake 3d effects or something like that. And like Fozzie said you can also export real 3d into shockwave, but then you'll probably need Director, I haven't tried it myself.

One thing I was surprised about is that with Illustrate you can actually network render files.

[gaggle]

IMO Illustrate! sucks for the whole Flash thing, it generates large files and often frames contains various errors.

Plasma's Flash converter does a fairly good job.
If you buy Plasma you get the opportunity to simply use its rendere in MAX though, idunno if it's common knowledge, but I'll mention it nonetheless :)

You install Plasma, then add a line to your MAX Plugins.ini that points to a specific Plasma folder containing some plugins, and voila presto, you're essentially using Plasma as a sort of plugin in MAX. In the end all you need are those couple of small files, you can just save them somewhere else, uninstall Plasma, and live long and prosperous.

I suggest you import those generates files into Flash MX and mess around, cuz the space-savings you can..er..save, are quite enourmous. There's nothing better than optimizing an animation to a fraction of it's original size..well..okay so there're many things better than that, but it's still neato.

Wrapping an AVI into a Flash file seems lame to me, I like the result of actual 3d vector graphics moving around, even if it means you have to be careful of your polycount.

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