3Dino - Another Approach to Flash 3D

PS Woods

November 17, 2000

With Flash 5 actionscripting stirring up more dust in the Flash developers' community than an Oklahoma tornado, the mad dash to do anything with 3D seems to have at least temporarily subsided (or maybe the subject is finally drifting to the back waters where it belongs). In any case, easy workflows for producing valuable Flash 3D content remain elusive.

What's worse, as Flashers continue to grope for anything that looks even remotely organic, users' expectations rise steadily. By this point in web history, surfers expect to see live-motion, video-quality real-time rendering. In Flash. That loads in 10 seconds or less. On version 3 browsers.

Believe it or not, we can do it...

First off, I did not invent this. I saw a simpler execution of this at the Oakley Products website, where my buddy works. They had a pair of ultra-cool sunglasses that rotated between three positions based on the position of the mouse pointer. So I thought, "If three positions work, why not twenty?"; and since there was no one present to say "Because you can't have that many bitmaps in a Flash file," I went ahead and tried it.

The basic concept is this:

Create the illusion of rotating an object in real time
The object is rendered in photorealistic detail
This is possible because the object is actually a series of photographs.
The perceived rotation is really just cycling through these carefully composed photographs.

Take a look at the finished product to see how this works ( requires Flash 5 Player)

This project starts with photography. I knew that I wanted to have 20 images, each differentiated by equal rotations, the sum of which would be a full circle. So I drew a guide on a piece of paper. (I did this in Freehand, shown below, but you could use anything that will draw a polygon, e.g. a 59¢ protractor).

3Dino - Another Approach to Flash 3D

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