Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
A visualization of how the extrude3D() command approximates a curved line from a series of straight lines
Geometry
The origin point of the extruder resource is at the bottom left corner of the front face. The width and height of the
resource, in world units, is approximately equal to the width and height of the image of the text, in pixels, after
trimming away all the white space around the edges.
For example, if the text fits into a bounding box with a width of 100 pixels and a height of 64 pixels, the extruder
resource fits into a bounding box that is approximately 100 units wide 64 units high. The length of the extruder
resource depends on its tunnelDepth property (see below).
Here is a Lingo command that you can execute to check this. Launch the 3dExtruder.dir movie and then execute this
command in the Message window:
-- Lingo syntax
do "vImage = member(3).image.trimWhiteSpace()"&RETURN&"put #trimmedImage, vImage.width,
vImage.height"&RETURN&"vBox = GetBoundingBox(member(1).model(1))"&RETURN&"put #boundingBox,
integer(vBox.maxX - vBox.minX), integer(vBox.maxY - vBox.minY)"
-- #trimmedImage 155 75
-- #boundingBox 157 75
The 3dExtruded.dir movie uses the Get Bounding Box script to determine the smallest possible box that fits around
the extruder model. It then creates a group to act as the parent of the extruder model, and places this parent group at
the center of the bounding box. If you rotate the parent group, the extruder model rotates around its center.
Extruder properties
Extruder resources have five properties that you can get and set:
extruderResource.smoothness: An integer value between 1 and 10. This determines how many points are used to
approximate the curved lines between the fixed points. A value of 1 means that only the fixed point is used. The
default value is 5, meaning that 4 additional points are added along the curve.
“Particles” on page 197tunnelDepth: A floating point value between 1.0 and 100.0. The default value is 50.0. This
determines the distance in world units between the front and back faces of the extruded model.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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