Adobe Director Basics

Chapter 1: 3D basics
Adobe® Director® lets you bring robust, high-performance 3D graphics to the web. With Director, you can develop a
wide spectrum of 3D productions, ranging from simple text handling to interactive product demonstrations to
complete immersive game environments. Using Shockwave® Player, users can view your work on the web with
Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, or other browsers that support web packaging.
Director lets you detect the capabilities of the user’s system and adjust playback demands accordingly. A powerful
computer with 3D hardware acceleration brings the best results, but users can successfully use Director movies with
3D on most Mac® or Windows® hardware platforms. The faster the computer’s graphics processing, the better the
results. The ability to adjust for client-side processing power makes Director ideal for web delivery.
What is Shockwave3D?
Shockwave3D allows you to simulate a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional screen.
In the real world, there are objects and sources of light. You can move around and see the objects from different angles.
Objects that are further away appear smaller than objects that are close to you. The same object looks different when
the lighting is different.
In the real world, objects are solid, and they obey the laws of physics. Some objects, like trees and buildings, are static.
Other objects, like human beings and chairs can move or be moved. Some objects, like clothes and paper can easily be
deformed. Real objects can be broken apart, exploded, burnt, or joined together. Real objects can be made to behave
in an infinite number of ways. Often, you cannot predict what will happen in the real world. The real world is very
complex.
In a simulated 3D scene, there are just pixels on a flat screen. If you want to give the illusion that these pixels represent
solid objects moving in three-dimensional space, you have to cheat. You have to trick your brain to make it imagine
real objects and not just pixels.
Shockwave3D does its best to trick your brain. A computer is not as fast as processing information as your brain, so
Shockwave3D has to take shortcuts.
Time and motion in the real world is continuous. When you watch a film in movie theatre, you see 24 static images
every second. Your brain merges these static images together and imagines that your eyes are seeing continuous
motion. A typical computer monitor updates its image 60 times a second. Director calls 1/60th of a second a tick.
In a simulated 3D scene, you can divide time into tiny discrete chunks, and your brain will not notice. Let's imagine
that the 2D representation of the 3D scene is updated 60 times a second. Let's also imagine that the scene is from a firstperson
action game. The player's viewpoint changes all the time. There are moving characters and objects. None of this
action can be predicted in advance.
Sixty times per second, Shockwave3D has to calculate the new position of the player's viewpoint, and the new position
of each object in the scene. It may have to do complicated mathematical calculations to determine how one object falls
and whether it has collided with another object. When all the calculations have been done, Shockwave3D is ready to
set the color of each of the pixels on the screen.
If the screen is big and there are a lot of moving objects, this process requires a lot of computer power. The 3D section
of the Director documentation will help you understand how to make good use of the limited power of a computer to
create the best illusion of a 3D scene.
Last updated 8/26/2011
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