Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
Texture renderFormat
Textures give precision and detail to the rendering of an image. However, they require significantly more space in the
computer's video Random Access Memory than 2D images.
A 2D image normally appears flat on the screen with one pixel of memory space corresponding to one pixel of screen
space. A 3D texture may be placed on a surface at any angle to the camera. A texture for a wall, for example may need
to be very detailed when it is viewed from directly in front and close up. If the wall is in the distance, or seen at a steeply
foreshortened angle, very few pixels on the screen actually uses the pixels stored in the texture. Only a small proportion
of the information stored in textures loaded into video RAM is used on any one frame. The graphics card used to
render an image to your client's monitor will have a finite capacity for textures. You may want to exploit the available
space to the best effect.
textureRenderFormat
You can set the texture.renderFormat property individually for each texture. Alternatively, you can set a default value
for all textures, using getRendererServices().textureRenderFormat.
For the best graphic quality, you can choose one of the 32-bit formats (#rgba8880 or #rgba8880). For more economic
use of the video RAM, you can use one of the 16-bit formats (#rgba5550, #rgba5650, #rgba5551 or #rgba4444). Any
texture whose renderFormat is set to #default will use the value set by getRendererServices().textureRenderFormat.
You can alter this value at runtime. See “Texture properties and method” on page 147for a discussion of the
scaleDown() method and for alternative techniques for finding the right balance between texture detail and size.
Antialiasing
See “Antialiasing” on page 390.
Render to texture
Let us consider that you are developing a car-racing game in Director. You need the driver of the car to see the other
cars and the 'scene' behind the car in the side rear-view mirrors.
The easiest way to achieve this is to use the render to texture feature. This feature helps you render objects with specific
'textures'during run-time and display the rendered scene on your users' devices faster.You can define the 'texture' using
a camera view. Everything that is within the camera view is considered as a 'texture', and the whole 'view' is applied to
the chosen object. In the car-racing example, you can place the camera behind the car. As the car moves, the camera
captures the view behind the car, and this view is applied as a 'texture' to the rear-view mirrors.
When you use camera views for render to texture, the image is copied onto the video RAM and then in the Lingo code,
and is then applied to the chosen object at run-time.
You can render the objects quickly by applying the image to the object directly from the video RAM. To do so, you
need to set the updateRTImageOnRender property to false.
The following are the typical steps that you need to follow for using render to texture:
1 Create a new texture with type rendertexture:
member(whichCastmember).newTexture(newTextureName {,#typeIndicator, rendTexWidth,
rendTexHeight})
The updateRTImageOnRender property is set to 'True' by default. This means, Director copies the texture image
from the video RAM to the Lingo code and then applies to the target object.
If you want to apply the texture directly from video RAM to the target object, set the updateRTImageOnRender
property to 'False'.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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