Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
You can drag the lines from the parent and rootNode boxes to any of the dots that indicates a node in the 3D cast
member. This will change the relationship between the camera and the literality”) in the 3D world. Experiment with
different settings.
In the following illustration, the parent of the light(“RedLight”) has been set to the parent of the model(“Head2”).
These two nodes share the same parent. However, the white light(“UIDirectional”) is nearer the head of the hierarchy.
The model(“Head1”) is not in the same branch as the camera's rootNode.
Only the model(“Head2”) and its children are rendered, and they are lit only by light(“Red Light”)
For more information on parent-child hierarchies, see “Node hierarchy” on page 91.
Sky box
Imagine that you are traveling in a fast car along a straight road. Objects that are close to you, such as telephone poles
along the sides of the road, appear to move past very fast in the opposite direction. The sky, on the other hand, is a huge
distance away. Even if you travel fast, the moon and the clouds appear to travel with you. If you create a 3D world with
an outdoor scene, you will want to be able to simulate this effect of a motionless sky. The solution is to create a sky box.
The principle is to create a specific camera to render the image of the sky, and then to render the rest of the world on
top of the sky image, using a different camera. You can do this with the techniques that you saw earlier in this section:
sprite3d.addCamera() in “Multiple cameras” on page 103
camera.rect in Multiple cameras
camera.colorBuffer.clearAtRender in “Color buffer” on page 105
camera.rootNode in “RootNode” on page 107
You also need to:
Synchronize the node.rotation of the camera that shows the sky with the rotation of the camera that shows the rest
of the world. For more information, see “Rotating around an object” on page 218 and “3D mathematics” on
page 361
Change the natural parent-child hierarchy of objects. For more information on this, see “Node hierarchy” on
page 91.
To see a demonstration of a sky box, download the movie Skybox.dir and launch it. You can use the arrow keys to
rotate the main camera or you can click on the 3D sprite, and then drag the mouse pointer in the direction in which
you want the camera to turn. To move forward or back, you can use the I and O (in and out) keys, or the W and S keys.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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