Accessibility

Director Article

 

Creating Bitmaps with Alpha Channels for Transparent Flash Applications, Director Bitmap Sprites, and Shockwave 3D Overlays


Karl Sigiscar

Karl Sigiscar

EF Education First Ltd.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Creating a Texture with an Opacity Mask Using Adobe Photoshop
  3. Creating a Texture with an Opacity Mask Using Macromedia Flash (PNG)
  4. Leveraging the 256 Levels of Transparency in Alpha Channels Using Macromedia Fireworks
  5. Creating a Picture with an Alpha Channel Gradient for Display in a Transparent Flash Animation Blending with the HTML Page Background
  6. Creating an Alpha Channel Feather Effect in Photoshop (PSD)
  7. Creating an Alpha Channel Feather Effect in Fireworks (PNG)
Created:
13 Jun 2005
User Level:
Intermediate

Alpha channels are one of the most advanced techniques in graphic design. However, a lot of people have trouble getting them right. It is often seen as something complicated, but it doesn't have to be that way. This article will show you five simple techniques to get your alpha channels right using Adobe Photoshop CS, Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004, and Macromedia Flash MX 2004. You can use these techniques to create transparent backgrounds for transparent Flash applications, textures that will be used for simple overlays or overlaid user interface elements for Shockwave 3D, or alpha channel bitmaps for compositing needs in 2D Director projects. In the article 3D User Interfaces and 3D App Building, I showed you how to create a user interface by displaying overlays on top of a Shockwave 3D scene. To this end, we used some bitmaps with alpha channels as textures. In this article, I will show you how to create them. To composite overlays with alpha channel bitmaps, you can use the Overlay Tweening behavior in the Chrome Lib set of Shockwave 3D behaviors for Director. You can also use this library to create a user interface from overlays (for example, the Overlay Button UI behavior). Visit www.chromelib.com to learn more.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Director MX or Director MX 2004

Fireworks MX 2004

Flash MX 2004

Adobe Photoshop

Learn more ›

Tutorials and sample files:

Page 1 of 7
Next Page

About the author

Karl Sigiscar has been a multimedia and web developer since 1997. He has used Flash since version 2 and ActionScript since its inception. He has been involved in large and complex multimedia projects, from data-driven multimedia contents to advanced car configurators using XML, databases, and web services. The Flash features that Karl is most impressed with are the display list and the ability to nest movie clips.