Introduction to Swift 3D - Page 13

It is no surprise that Swift 3D is very popular among Flash developers. It uses a familiar concept of timeline-based animation with keyframes and tweening, plus a few function-curve- style options for customizing the characteristics of keyframes. It offers superslick output for geometric solids and very good flat-color output for organically shaped models. Another great feature is the interface: it is designed to get work done. In a very short time from when I first installed Swift 3D, I felt comfortable performing every operation. The tools seem to be designed to require a minimum of interruptions to go to toolbars or menus. Finally, and not least of all, it is in such a price range that you might pick it up on an impulse while browsing your local office supply store on your lunch break. If you want to move models around, do some simple animation in an easy-to-learn and use environment, Swift is a good choice.

We are going to look at Swift 3D in the context of a project, the end result of which you can see in spaceship.swf. We are going to take the spaceship model we made in Strata and bring it into Swift 3D to animate it. Take a look at the finished movie to get an idea of what we are building.

NOTE: Strata has a complete animation toolset built in — even in the free version. We are importing models into Swift 3D because, at present, there aren't many 3D packages that have tools for models and animation, plus support plug-ins that will generate 3D output. The packages that do have these features are much more expensive than the tools covered in this chapter. You will know when you need them.

Conversion

The first thing you will have to do in order to animate your spaceship is to find a common file format between Strata and Swift 3D. Unfortunately, Swift 3D only supports incoming 3DS models, and Strata won't write to that format. The first bit of good news is that Strata can save your models in the DXF format, which is one of the most common media of exchange in the 3D world. The other good news is that there is no shortage of applications that will translate between these formats without losing any information that will matter to us for this type of project.

Find a conversion utility and use it to translate your DXF spaceship model (exported from Strata) into a 3DS model. If you already own any 3D applications, it is entirely likely that they can perform this chore for you. These are both very common file formats.

Materials

When you create a new Swift 3D movie from an existing 3DS model without any material (color) information, you will get the default gray color for the entire model. I still want to use a gray to start with, but a gray that better fits my conception of a Hollywood spaceship. Figure 20-16 shows the cursor dragging a material from the materials palette directly onto the spaceship.

If you exported your entire spaceship as one DXF and converted it automatically to a 3DS, you will not be able to ungroup the pieces of the spaceship to apply different colors to different parts. Fixing this is easy. You can either export your model from Strata one piece at a time or use modeling software that supports every aspect of 3DS.

Transformation, Selection, and Viewing

When I opened my version of the spaceship — possibly because of the conversion utility I used — the orientation of the model was off by 90 degrees. If you used my sample files to apply a material to the space ship, or if the tools you are using for conversion produce similar results, you may have noticed that when the viewport says "Top-Active," you are really looking at the front of the spaceship. This is a good opportunity to get acquainted with the viewing, selection, and transformation tools in Swift 3D.

Figure 20.16 The spaceship going to the body shop

First things first: split the active viewport by either selecting View | Secondary Camera or by clicking on the little tool icon with two cameras in the main toolbar across the top of the screen. Some 3D applications make me literally claustrophobic, and the default view of Swift 3D is one of them. If you have multiple monitors, the best arrangement seems to be to undock the property tools palette and put it on another monitor. At this point, your two viewports should be nice and big. Notice that when you mouse-over any tool button in Swift 3D, you get a pretty good tooltip. Most of them say exactly what they do (as opposed to cryptic, mumbo-jumbo names).

The viewports work a little bit differently in Swift 3D than they do in Strata. Try clicking on an area in either viewport away from the model, and drag. The default action of the mouse in a viewport is to pan. That's a nice feature, and a good indication that ease of use was probably one of the top considerations when Swift 3D was designed.

The other built-in view feature works when you drag up and down with the right mouse button: you zoom in and out. These two features make changing your view to suit your moment-to-moment needs practically subconscious.

The basic nature of the viewports in Swift 3D is a little different from most 3D packages. In Strata, for instance, when you build an animation, you drop an actual camera into your scene, complete with all the controls that a real-world camera has. You can follow what the camera is seeing by opening a separate window for it and then toggle back to the regular viewports to move your objects around your scene in a familiar environment.

In Swift 3D, the viewports are the cameras, and vice versa. There are two main areas of impact where this is concerned. First, it is easier to keep track of simple animations, because you know exactly what you are getting. The second way this affects you is that you have to be very careful when you animate cameras. This is because you only get one camera to capture your animation. If you get creative, you can animate a standard view (top, bottom, etc.) and use it as a secondary camera, but then you lose your ability to view and select in that view.

Selecting and moving objects is also very easy. The first time you click in a viewport, you are activating that viewport. The next time you click, you are selecting the object you click on, or panning the viewport, depending on where you click.

Rotation is handled with Swift 3D's 100 percent unique transformation tools, which they call Crystal Trackball. The next step in the project is to correct the position of the spaceship, so that front is front and top is top. Select the spaceship in the front viewport and go to the rotation trackball. You can constrain the rotation of objects to a number of increments, which is especially handy if you are getting started with 3D concepts, have a small monitor or low resolution, or just have jittery hands. Click once on the constrain angle button to get the flyout menu as shown next and click on 90 Degrees.

Next select the arrow that points up and down (above the constrain angle button). Pull the trackball down until it snaps 90 degrees. You should now have an orientation you can work with.

Finally, scaling follows the same concept as the easy zoom control: dragging toward the center of the object scales down, and dragging away from the center scales up. To enter scaling mode, select Edit | Scaling Mode or just click on the scaling mode button on the main toolbar. Following the guiding principle of ease of use and quick workflow that pervades Swift 3D, scaling mode automatically exits to the default move tool after every time you scale an object.

Meta Ball - Page 12
Macromedia Flash 5 Developer's Guide
Animation in Swift 3D - Page 14