Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D: Controlling action
You cannot create new animations within Director. You can however create new motions to map an existing
animation to specific bones in an animated model. However, in Director 11.5, there is no method for obtaining the
names of the bones within an animated model. See Motions for more details.
Motions
A 3D cast member can contain a set of motions authored in your 3D-modeling application. Motions are either of the
type #keyframe or #bones. A motion with a type of #none can act as an inactive placeholder. To play back a motion,
use the appropriate modifier.
Play list
The keyframe and bones players manage a queue of motions. The first motion in the play list is the motion that is
currently playing or paused. When that motion finishes playing, it is removed from the play list and the next motion
begins.
Motions on the playList can be blended into each other as they are playing, in which case they will play simultaneously.
See “Motion blending” on page 272 for more details.
Adding a motion to the playList
You can use two commands to add a motion to the playList.
model.motionsPlayer.queue()
model.motionsPlayer.play()
Both queue() and play() accept a series of parameters which allow you to determine where the motion starts playing,
when it ends, whether it loops, and how quickly it plays. See the Scripting Dictionary entries for details.
The following example adds two motions to the playList for the model named “Bronco”:
-- Lingo syntax
vModel = member("3D").model("Bronco")
vModel.bonesPlayer.queue("Buck")
vModel.bonesPlayer.play("Rear")
The queue() command places the named motion at the end of the playList. It will start to play when all the motions
already in the queue have finished playing.
The play() command places the named motion at the beginning of the playList and starts to play it. The motion that
was previously playing is stopped, and pushed back to the second position in the playList.
In the example given above, the Buck motion was placed first in the queue, and then immediately replaced in the first
position by the Rear motion. As a result, the motions play in the order Rear, then Buck. If autoblend were FALSE, the
playList looks like this (edited for clarity):
time 0: [[#name:"Buck", #endTime:813]]
time 1: [[#name:"Rear", #endTime:446], [#name:"Buck", #endTime:813]]
-- The motion Rear now plays
time 447: [[#name:"Buck", #endTime:813]]
-- The motion Rear is finished, so Buck can now play
time 1260: []
-- The motion Buck is now also finished
Motions are removed from the play list automatically when they are complete.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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