Tutorial: Comic Preview output in Flash SWF, and how to get it to PNG

In Poser 11, saving the Poser Comic Book Preview render as a single-frame Flash .SWF movie results in yet another type of toon render. The Preview render is vectorised and saved as a single-frame .SWF file…

To then quickly test if your .SWF output is viable, you then simply load it in Internet Explorer browser. Even if (very sensibly) you have uninstalled Flash from your PC, the IE browser still has a native Flash-viewer baked into it and un-uninstallable. Though IE cannot then save the .SWF out as an image — a screenshot is all that can be obtained…

If you’re making webcomics that may be all you need. But what if you want it as a nice big .PNG? Well, .SWF is now a obsolete vector format. It was used by Adobe Flash, and Poser’s output of the format seems to be utterly impossible to open and save to .PNG or .SVG using freeware. I tried and searched and test-installed various utilities and possibilities. But with no luck on my test .SWF file output from Poser. Even the free JPEXS Flash Decompiler wouldn’t see the image inside it! And yet, IE displayed it with no problem!

In the end, a trial version of the full Adobe Animate (the new name for Flash) was the only free software that could do the SWF to PNG job and get the proper render out as a result! It is total overkill to install this sluggish Adobe behemoth just to get a PNG, but it works. Here’s the process:

1. In Adobe Animate, open a Stage from a template large enough to encompass your render size.
1. File > Import > Import to Stage > then load your .SWF in.
2. Then File > Export > Export Image. Uncheck “Transparency” and “Clip to Stage”. Save as an 8-bit PNG…

In practice the look of it is not that much different from a normal PNG from Poser. But, as .SWF is vector, you should also be able to save it to .SVG for editing in the likes of the open source Inkscape and (now also) Krita. It appears that one can do that from Animate, by using Tom Byrne’s free Flash2SVG plugin. Although I didn’t test that for this tutorial. But this should mean that one could export as vector just the ink lines from a Comic Book Preview render, then apply a radical new style to those lines at the click of a button.

Hopefully we’ll get a simple native .SVG vector export in Poser 12, to replace the old .SWF export.