Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
lineOffset and useLineOffset
If you set lineOffset to TRUE, you can alter the apparent thickness of the creases and boundary lines by altering the
value of lineOffset. You can use values between -100.0 (thickest) to 100.0 (thinnest lines). If you use a value outside
this range, you will provoke a “Value out of range” script error.Note: You may wish to be cautious about using the
lineOffset property, because when the camera is in certain positions, a series of apparently random lines may be drawn
into the 3D sprite when useLineOffset is set to TRUE.
Textures
Textures are images that are optimized for display in a 3D environment. Each shader can have textures applied to it.
Textures are 2D images drawn on the surface of a model. The appearance of the model’s surface is the combined effect
of the shader and textures applied to it. If you do not specify a texture, a default red-and-white bitmap is used. Textures
can also be displayed as 2D overlays and backdrops, or as particles emitted by a particle system.
A texture is an image object stored inside a 3D cast member. Textures can be used in three ways:
To map an image to the surface of a mesh or to provide information about the material or the environment, inside
one of the texture layers of a shader object, See “Standard shaders” on page 131for details on how to use a texture
inside a shader. See “Mapping a texture to a mesh resource” on page 150 for information on how to prepare a mesh
resource so that the textures inside a shader are displayed correctly.
As a 2D overlay or backdrop for a camera object. See “Overlays and backdrops” on page 47.
To provide an image for the particles in a particle emitter object, see “Particles” on page 197.
The treatment of images in a 3D environment makes intensive use of the computer processor, so various techniques
are used to improve performance. The most obvious difference between 3D textures and 2D images is that 3D textures
only have a limited number of possible dimensions. See “Images for textures” on page 144 for more details. Textures
also have a number of properties that tells the video card how much processing to do before displaying them. See
“Texture properties and method” on page 147 for more details.
Texture names
All textures in a given 3D cast member must have unique names. If you try to create a new texture with the same name
as an existing texture, a script error occurs: “Object with duplicate name already exists”. See “3D namespace” on
page 85 for more details.
Accessing a texture
A 3D world exported from a third-party 3D design application is likely to have many textures included within it.
Textures are stored in the texture palette of the 3D cast member and can be referenced:
By name (Lingo only)
By index number
For example:
Last updated 8/26/2011
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