Introduction
Background patterns are a pretty trendy, and they are a nice way to move your flash movie away from that cartoonish vector look without increasing the load time by using larger bitmaps. There is however a slight trick to get bitmaps to tile properly in flash.
If you were to just import an image into flash and then use the paintbucket tool to fill it, the patten would be scaled and distorted. (see example)
Flash pattern fill.
- Create a shape, for example a rectangle , that you want to fill with the bitmap.
- Pick the bitmap that you want to use in flash, heres the one that i used
- Import the image into flash. File->Import->Import to Stage.
- Click on the imported image (you should see a grey border appear). Then goto Modify ->Break Apart
- Select the eyedropper tool and use it to sample the image.
- And then finally use the paint bucket tool to fill in the background.
Extension for the Flash pattern fill tutorial.
The simple vector, cartoonish look of flash has become overused,tired and old. A lot of new flash sites and movies now tend to have more and more raster images incorporated into them. This usually results in greater dowload times. Designers have to come up with creative ways to keep the size low while at the same time avoid making their movies look too vectorish.
Places where you can find Nice Free Patterns
- SquidFingers (used in example)
- k10k
