Flash?

Any swf exporters for 2.42a?

sflender!!

the thread topic says for 2.26 only but at the last page cambo has done an update (that I am going to try out this afternoon :slight_smile: )

hope this helps

Okey, well I tried it earlier today and Blender just crashed when I used it… :frowning:

another alternative is to render your animation into an AVI , and use this set of utilitys to make it into a flash file.
http://www.swftools.org/
looks like they have tools for PNG,JPG, and AVI amongst other neat utilitys :slight_smile:

I have only tested the AVI2SWF.exe utility, and it works verry fast!
(special thanks to cambo for linking us to this set of tools in another thread :slight_smile: )

edit:
NOTE:: I used only the AVI raw format… the utility dose not seem to like some codecs on my windows X64 system and teh avi raw was the format that worked for me :slight_smile:

Well, this is surely a nice way to do something similar. However, technically speaking, this is very different to the mentioned Blender’s Flash exporter plugin. Btw you find this plugin in this thread here. In post #36 user Cambo links to the newest version of the exporter plugin.

Back to topic… :slight_smile: The Sfblender plugin linked above exports to a (2d) vector Flash file. So usually the files are moderate in size and can be scaled (by the browser’s Flash plugin) with no loss. However, they usually don’t look as sharp and exact as an actually rendered bitmap file/movie.
Your export way to PNG/AVI is a bitmap rendered file and then converted with the cool SwfTools to a bitmap Flash movie.

Both methods are handy for their cases, but are very different internally, despite of the same “.swf” file ending. :slight_smile:

In case I mixed something up, please let me know. Thanks.
All the best!

as Albrecht says those are two completely different purposes: to make a movie or to make a vectorial animation. Both are possible with swf format, since it is a very versatile format that can contain images, vectorial shapes, sound, video, and many other things.
But the interest of this flash exporter for blender is to make vector animations from blender (typically toon-style aspect). The exporter has many options for that, but only for that. It cannot render much shading, smooth things, etc… Basically just lines and fills.

Now if what you want is simply have your rendered animation in swf format (for example youtube and googlevideo movies are in swf format), all you need to do is convert your rendered animation to swf format. (there are several free tools to do that). It is a simple operation, but you usually need to test a bit to find a suitable quality/filesize balance.

OK, since the other thread I linked to covers the Sfblender vector exporter plugin, I’ll ask my question about bitmap movie export to Flash here:

I’ve rendered an animated Blender scene to PNG files and used the nice SwfTools to convert them to a bitmap Flash movie. I used png2swf for that.

While this basically works, the output is huge, because there’s just normal lossless compression (aka PNG), so the output is the size of all PNGs added together.
Newer Flash player versions (v8 I think?) include a Mpeg4 decoder in order to replay lossy compressed Mpeg4 (?) movies, comparable to Xvid, Divx, etc. You see them on GoogleVideo, YouTube, etc.

With the retail version of Flash v8 (not the small player plugin) you can encode such Flash movie files, but my question is: is there a free way to encode such a Mpeg4 Movie with a series of Blender rendered PNG files?

Thanks in advance!

I think the swf format has its own way of compressing video. (When you import a mp4 movie into flash, i think it gets converted their own way ,something called flv - flashvideo when you export the swf file). So probably what you need to do is, when you turn you pngs into swf, play a bit with the settings, like framerate, image size, and, most important, bitrate. I never used swftools, but ffmpeg, which is opensource and has linux and windows versions, has many options for you to obtain a good balance between quality and filesize. Just to remind, bitrate is what defines how many Kb a video can have per second, and it is really the parameter that controls everything in a video. High bitrate means higher quality but also higher filesize.

Many thanks for your hints!
In Png2Swf there’s no bitrate setting, so this tool can’t procude lossy compressed video, but… thanks to your hint I now found the Avi2Swf tool in the SwfTools collection which… “AVI2SWF Converts AVI animation files to SWF. It supports Flash MX H.263 compression”.

So I just need to put all my existing PNGs into an uncompressed AVI, or use the AVI raw output of Blender in the future, and then use Avi2Swf. Or, in case that’s too unhandy, use your mentioned ffmpeg. Ffmpeg sounds familiar to me: is this maybe inside the nice and free Mplayer, too? Because the latter one I use for playing audio and video files.

Well, we’ll see. Thanks a lot for your kind explanation.