Importing Illustrator vectors into Flash

[goat]

Hi, so I'm completely new to flash and still learning the basics, but I know Illustrator backwards and forwards. I'd really like to make the art work in illustrator and import it to flash for the animation. I've done a few tests and found that (no surprise) special opacity effects do translate, which is fine. The clipping masks seem to be intact but I'm not sure if they are a good idea or not... long story short: I need help organizing my .ai files to import into flash as symbols (i guess) and then rig those with the bone tool or something...? I've been told that Flash uses layers and not groups, so i shouldn't group an element but rather place it on a new layer? I'm a little lost, so any help would be much appreciated.

Another note, I'm not going to be doing most of the animation, but rather giving a file to an animator to work with.

I'll attach a little test i did in illustrator and a rough animation i did in photoshop to simulate (in an extremely crude way) what i want the flash to do, so some one can show me what I'm doing wrong...

bunny-talk-animation-rough.ai

(1.4 MiB) Downloaded 49 times

bunny-talk-animation-test.gif (80.94 KiB) Viewed 1097 times

[Exist]

Importing illustrator files works the same as any other file in Flash. Go File > Import > Import to Library. After the file is imported you should get a box with a bunch of settings that will let you pick what is what and what to import from the file. I have only done this once before but ill give you a little bit of advice, save the .ai to a version below or equal to the version of flash you have. So if I have illustrator CS5 and Flash CS4, I would have to save the .ai to a lower file version.

[goat]

Thanks! That worked like a charm, I'm learning but I'm still a little derpy when it cones to Flash.