Illustrator CS4 Effects and FXG

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fxg_logoI’m working on some Flash Catalyst samples that use Illustrator instead of Photoshop and I’m finding that Illustrator is really hard. It’s also going to be a very, very powerful way to create graphics and content for Flex applications because of FXG. For those that don’t know, FXG is an XML-based graphics format that is part of the Flex Framework and works with a lot of the CS4 tools. What makes Illustrator so great is that since it’s vector based, almost anything you do can be represented as tags in FXG. FXG supports a number of Bitmap Filters and Effects but I wasn’t sure which of those you can actually create in Illustrator and have represented as a property in FXG (as opposed to a rasterized BitmapGraphic). I asked around internally and Sanjay Kumar, an engineering manager on the Illustrator team, gave me a quick rundown:

  • DropShadowFilter: Stylize->Drop Shadow
  • GlowFilter with Inner = true: Stylize->Inner Glow
  • GlowFilter with Inner = false: Stylize->Outer Glow
  • BlurFilter: Blur->Gaussian Blur

For the most part they’re pretty straightforward, but there are a few, such as BevelFilter, GradientGlowFliter, and ColorMatrixFilter that you can’t create from Illustrator. Hopefully we’ll add more in both future versions of FXG and Illustrator. There’s a ton of stuff in the FXG spec that’s worth checking out.

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  • http://www.bryanbartow.com Bryan Bartow

    Glad to see Illustrator will be able to export to FXG (or does it already?) I much prefer the Illustrator drawing tools to the Flash drawing tools for creating vectors. If only I had a copy of Catalyst to play with…

  • http://www.layerxtech.com Mike Kay

    Ryan,

    Interesting note on Illustrator. My team has recently been playing with Catalyst/Gumbo and have been experimenting with both AI/FXG and FW/PNG files to determine their impact on code size, runtime speed, etc. While we don’t have any definitive numbers to share yet our assumption is that FXG will be the winner. The code size seems larger, but we suspect render time will be faster. Using AI/FC I created a gauge component that functions using a state transition, effectively allowing us to create very rich visual gauges with almost no ActionScript (aka… more work done at design time vs. dev time). If you want to chat more let us know… We’re doing a lot of AI/FC work.