Cadbury adams pixelated Flash images

A lot of Flash work I’ve seen recently has had really choppy looking images in Flash. This is especially true in images that are rotated. Today I was randomly searching around for the maker of Chiclets (whole different story) and ran across the Cadbury Adams site (pictured above). Someone did some pretty significant tweening there to get the effect of the brands going along the animated rope, but as the images go around all of the boxes get really mangled.

There is a very easy fix that would have made the SWF look many times better, but I’ve been discovering that the feature isn’t well known about by people starting with Flash in the last few versions. To let your images to be cleanly smoothed as they are resized and/or rotated go to the bitmap in your library, right mouse click and select properties. From there select “Allow Smoothing.”

I’m trying to figure out if the default in the past was to have the image smooth since I don’t really remember seeing as many sites having issues like this one. Otherwise it could be a feature that has been lost to the ages (though I’m sure YOU know about it!) :D.

Also if you want to have your image smooth in some cases, but not smooth in others, you can always take an instance of the image and use break apart (not trace as bitmap!) which will take the image, remove it and replace it with a vector shape of the same size and position and give it a fill with the bitmap. This will always allow smoothing. Any non-broken-apart images then will remain crisp.