After posting the above… I figured this out and wanted to share here for edification to anyone who may need it:
POSTED ON FLASHKIT GAME FORUMS
OK!! I figured this out in a 45 second massive moment of clarity.
3d program I am using is called 3DC by Amabilis [img:1ykuyua7]http://www.amabilis.com[/img:1ykuyua7]
<!– m –><a class="postlink" href="http://www.amabilis.com">http://www.amabilis.com</a><!– m –>
. I have to give credit to the developer: it is an awesome and very inexpensive program for 3d animations and has great features you would NOT expect to find in something so inexpensive. Supports boned animations, etc. I was making objects in 3DC, exporting as .3ds, importing them into Swift3d, rendering, bringing into Flash. What a pain in the neck, and Swift3D often did not like the model when I tried to import it..especially if it had a lot of faces or vertices. And I could never import an entire animation, just a model. That left me with this question: How to use the awesome bone features in 3DC to make a full Character animation (for a game or monster character), and get the final product into Flash without going through Swift3D? My last post about this was dealing with the transparency issues.
SOLUTION!!
1) Rendered the animation to Series of Bitmaps, at 12 fps (or whatever your Flash destination is going to use)
2) Created a new Animated Gif using Jasc Software’s Animation Shop (Comes with Paint Shop Pro). I imported all the bitmaps as a group, the program automatically put them all in correct sequence on a timeline.
3) I clicked once in each frame to flood fill with transparency. This turned the black areas surrounding my rendered object into transparent!
4) Exported into animated .Gif
5) In Flash, Imported to library. This brought in all the support bitmaps and the gif as a movie clip. The movie clip acts the same way as one imported from Swift3D, contains all the frames with the bitmaps in them already. Nice transparency around the edge of the rendered object!
6) DONE!!! AHAHAHA
Ok, one last thing to resolve is that the imported/created movie clip is not optimized for size. It is the original dimensions of the rendered animation. This might mess up any hittests I would use, but is a lot easier to fix by moving things around than hand-deleting transparent areas frame by frame is.
Sorry if this is a little confusing, but I am so pumped to be able to do this I wanted to write it up quickly! If you have ever tried to do complex animations using Swift3D you will understand the value in this.