Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
Layer property lists: blendFunctionList, blendSourceList, blendConstantList, textureList, textureModeList,
textureRepeatList, textureTransformList, and wrapTransformList
Color properties
A #standard shader has four color properties. These properties determine how the shader as a whole reacts to light
sources.
Director uses three different kinds of light sources:
“Ambient light” on page 123
Diffuse light: “Directional lights” on page 124, “Point lights” on page 125, and “Spot lights” on page 126
“Specular Light” on page 130
See “Interactions with shaders” on page 123 for a comparison table. The ambient, diffuse, and specular properties of a
shader determine how the shader reacts to each of these different types of lighting. For example, imagine a shader with
the following properties:
vShader = member("3D").newShader("Example")
vShade.ambient = rgb("#0000FF")
vShade.diffuse = rgb("#FFFFFF")
vShade.specular = rgb("#808080")
This shader only reflects the blue channel of the ambient light. It reflects all of the light from diffuse sources
(directional, point, and spot lights). It reflects 50% of all specular light from diffuse sources whose specular property
is set to TRUE. In other words, it appears blue on faces that are pointing away from any diffuse light source, and it
shows dim specular highlights where a light bounces off its surface directly towards the camera.
Note: If there are one or more textures attached to the shader, and the shader's useDiffuseWithTexture property is set to
FALSE, then the shader does not react to diffuse light. The useDiffuseWithTexture property is FALSE by default on all
new shaders.
Emissive
The emissive property allows you to make a shader glow with its own light. If you want to use a baked texture on a
model, then you must set the emissive property of all its shaders to rgb(“#FFFFFF”).
You can see a demo where the emissive property of a shader is changed to highlight the model under the mouse at
“Pick Action behavior” on page 244.
Surface properties
Surface properties are applied to the whole shader.
shininess changes how shiny the surface of the model appears to be. A value of 0 creates a matte surface. Values
from 1.0 and 100.0 make the surface shiny to varying degrees, with 1.0 being the most shiny and 100.0 being the
least. A value greater than 0.0, but less than 1.0 is treated is if it were 1.0. The default value for new shaders is 30.0.
The effect of shininess will only be apparent if the specular color of the shader is not black. See also the note below
concerning the flat property.
transparent and blend determine whether you can see through the surface of the model. The transparent property
can be set to TRUE or FALSE; the blend property can have any value between 0.0 and 100.0. If transparent is FALSE,
then the model will appear opaque, regardless of the value of blend. If transparent is TRUE, then the lower the value
of blend, the more transparent the model will appear. If blend is set to 100.0 then the model will appear fully opaque,
even if transparent is set to TRUE. See the note below about issues with more than one semi-transparent models in
a scene.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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