Animate and magnify a drawing

[Chuck_Wolff@adobeforums.com]

My son was playing a George Shrinks game on PBS kids.org. The game is to find a tiny George in a messy kids room. The art looks like a vector drawing then animated. The amazing thing is a magnify glass is moved around the art with the pointer with amazing sharpness under the glass, even a distortion with light on the glass edges. This is very creative art with what looks like vector drawing, all this at low internet rez and tiny detail.

[Gary_Newman@adobeforums.com]

It really is cool. It's obviously done with Flash, and with any Flash item you can hold down the Control key and zoom in. The whole room background seems to be a pixel image, while shrunken George is vector. You can zoom in on him all you want and he stays sharp and crisp.

[James_E._Talmage@adobeforums.com]

I hope no one considers it inappropriate to post here, but I remembered that Ian Kelleigh, one of the "regulars" in the FH newsgroup had a sample of the basic technique (with downloadable source .fla file) on his site at:

<http://www.freehandsource.com/_frames/_tips/_archive/tip_week061.html>

As you'll see from the explanation, the magnifying functionality is not from FH, but from a script in the .fla. I imagine the same thing can be done (and no doubt has) with LiveMotion or maybe even CorelDraw/RAVE (although I don't see any actual scripting support in RAVE. Anyone know about that?). The underlying artwork, of course, can be done with AI, FH, CD, CV, etc.

It's a shame Adobe decided it had to let LiveMotion drop. With a bit more friendly scripting interface, I would have really liked it. I've only just purchsed (arrived yesterday) a copy of Corel's RAVE 3, so haven't had any time yet to do anything more than just poke around in it. But at first blush, it looks like a pretty clean "poor man's Flash."

I've been playing around with a little JavaScript in Acrobat Pro. Right now, it's rather intimidating because there is no really friendly kind of interface for building scripts. And I personally think Adobe is missing the "big picture" by making Acrobat forms so server-side centric. But I do wonder if/suspect that Adobe may have great plans for animation within Acrobat.

JET

[LRK@adobeforums.com]

Chuck,

Nice to see you back. Your son is growing up before our eyes. My best to you and your family!

Linda

***

James,

Thank you for posting that link. I am trying to improve and broaden my own Flash & Illustrator skills right now while I have a little extra time.

[Chuck_Wolff@adobeforums.com]

Hi Linda,
My little guy is growing fast, every day he learns and plays with enormous energy. Patrick is at pre-school now, and 4 yrs old soon.
Your idea to keep learning in illustrator and flash have me fired up to keep the creative spark going. The work in flash is amazing on the low rez internet. I have a demo cd with MX, but I need panther to run it. It looks like my old G4 400 may be out of the loop with panther. Or is it? I read conflicting reviews about panther on older systems.