Adobe Director Basics

ADOBE DIRECTOR BASICS
3D basics
The movie Cube.dir creates a cube model and places it at the center of the 3D world
Open the Shockwave 3D window by double-clicking on the "3D World" member in the Cast window, and use the
Rotate Camera tool to view the cube from all sides.
The code in the "Create Cube" behavior does 4 key things:
1 Creates a model resource using a box primitive (see “Regular primitives” on page 71).
2 Creates a model using the new model resource.
3 Makes both the inside and the outside faces of the model visible.
4 Changes the shader used by the model so that the vertex points and faces are visible.
Do not worry about how the code works yet. What you need to study is how the box shape is defined. When you finish
reading this section, you will be able to understand the code.
To create a realistic box, you only need 8 vertex points and 12 polygons.
Note: To create a realistic human figure, you need several hundred vertex points and faces. The more polygons a model
resource has, the more calculations Director needs to make in order to display it. If your 3D world needs to react quickly
to user input, it is a good idea to use as few polygons as possible.
Vertex points
The model resource in the Cube.dir movie has 8 vertex points. The first one is at the position vector(25, -25, -
25). To reach that point, you:
Start at the center of the world at vector(0, 0, 0)
Move 25 world units in the same direction as the red x-axis
Move 25 units downward (in the opposite direction of the green y-axis)
Move 25 units backwards (in the opposite direction of the blue z-axis)
Last updated 8/26/2011
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