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Director Article

 

3D User Interfaces and 3D App Building Using the Chrome Library Set of Behaviors


Karl Sigiscar

Karl Sigiscar

EF Education First Ltd.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Setting Up the Texture Render Format
  3. Setting Up Hardware Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
  4. Setting Up the Shader Blend Level for Reflection
  5. Opening and Closing the Movable Parts of the Car
  6. Creating a UI on Top of the 3D Scene
  7. Changing the Camera
  8. Creating a 3D Navigation System for a Website
  9. Controlling Flash from Shockwave 3D
  10. Afterword and Conclusion
Created:
15 March 2004
User Level:
Beginner

The Chrome Library set of 3D behaviors lets you quickly set up your scene with drag and drop behaviors to adjust rendering parameters. However, you can do much more. You can create a user interface on top of 3D sprites to control behaviors, or you can control a Macromedia Flash movie from the 3D scene. You can also create navigation interfaces using rollover models with associated links, or display a tooltip when rolling over a given model. To perform certain actions, UI behaviors allow you to call handlers on behaviors that are already assigned to the W3D sprite. Combining all of these, you can build more complex projects. The Chrome Library is available at the following address: www.chromelib.com

You will start where you left off in the first article dedicated to the Chrome Lib and add interactivity to the scene. You had a car displayed on a booth in the foreground with a screen in the background.

The mesh and textures of the car W3D files in this article were created by Stephen Magnardi. The W3D file of the car, wheels, and booth is made up of 21,603 polygons. Most textures are 256 x 256 pixels in size. Some textures are 512 x 512.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Director MX 2004

Tutorials and sample files:

Purchase and download the W3D files from TurboSquid.com (search keyword: signum)

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About the author

Karl Sigiscar has been a multimedia and web developer since 1997. He has used Flash since version 2 and ActionScript since its inception. He has been involved in large and complex multimedia projects, from data-driven multimedia contents to advanced car configurators using XML, databases, and web services. The Flash features that Karl is most impressed with are the display list and the ability to nest movie clips.