Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling appearance
See “Hugging Terrain” on page 238 for a simple script that generates a rectangular terrain from data in a heightmap
Bitmap member. White pixels are high points, black pixels are low points, and gray pixels create a gradient in
between. The Bitmap member's regPoint is used as the origin for the terrain mesh.
See “Terrains” on page 319 for a more comprehensive script that generates a terrain from a height-map. This script
also automatically creates a terrain object which uses the Dynamiks Physics Xtra extension to ensure that rigidBody
objects do not pass through the terrain mesh. The mesh generator primitive’s type property is #mesh and is created
by the member’s newMesh() method. The parameters included with that method describe how large the mesh will be.
You can use the mesh deform modifier to manipulate vertex positions at runtime for #mesh or any other type of model
resource. You can also use the #mesh primitive to change mesh properties directly.
Ingredients
All types of model resource (except for the Particle resource) store five types of information:
A list of vertex points
A list of normal directions
A list of colors
A list of texture coordinates
Information on each of the faces. This information includes:
Which vertex point is at each corner of the triangular face
The color of each vertex
The normal at each vertex
The shader for the face (this determines which mesh it belongs to)
The texture coordinates for the face
The faces that share a neighboring edge
To create a model resource of the type #mesh, provide all this information, or rely on appropriate default values.
Imagine that you want to create a trick playing card which can be used to display either a Jack of Spades or a Queen of
Hearts. To help you visualize this, download and launch the movie TrickCard.dir.
You can simulate a trick playing card with 8 vertices and 12 triangular faces
Last updated 8/26/2011
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