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Director 8.5 3D tutorial for Director users - This tutorial is designed as an introduction to the Macromedia Director 8.5 3D features for users who are already familiar with the basic functions of Director. It will familiarize you with the differences between 3D cast members and other cast members. In addition, it demonstrates some of the tasks you'll perform when using 3D models in Director.

Director 8.5 tutorial for 3D users
This tutorial is designed as an introduction to Macromedia Director 8.5 for users who have experience with 3D modeling and animation applications. It emphasizes the basic tasks you'll perform when using Director. In addition, it demonstrates many of the tasks you'll perform when using 3D models in Director.

Getting oriented to 3D
Macromedia Director 8.5 builds on earlier versions of Director, but the inclusion of 3D features introduces new concepts. Once you're familiar with these concepts, using the 3D features becomes much easier.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Workflow overview
From the artist's standpoint, the components of 3D content creation are modeling, texturing and UVW mapping, (character) animation setup, and animation. 3D files also include substantial information about asset organization.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Modeling
You can create simple 3D objects in Director 8.5—text objects and primitives such as boxes, spheres, and torus—without an external 3D tool for the modeling, texturing, or animation.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Texturing and mapping
Texturing and mapping are important ways to control the size of your models. Throughout the history of 3D games, carefully painted texture maps have supplied the details for lightweight models.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Cameras
3D packages are built around the metaphor of a film studio: the user looks through a camera into a space populated with objects and lit by lights. Always set up lights and cameras in the 3D scene at your earliest opportunity, and export your scene to Shockwave 3D as viewed through a camera. If you have multiple cameras, the export is previewed through the active one.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Lights
Shockwave 3D supports ambient lights, point lights, round spots, and directional lights. If your scene doesn't include background geometry, the background color set in your 3D modeler will be the background color in the Shockwave 3D scene.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Animation and model setup
Shockwave 3D is designed to accommodate both simple and highly detailed models and animation. The simplest case is to animate separate rigid-body objects independently of each other by keyframing the changes in their position, rotation, or scale…

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: About exporters
Director 8.5 ships with an exporter for 3D Studio Max 3.1 and Character Studio 2.2. Discreet will provide updated exporters for Max 4.0 and Character Studio 3.x. There are many other vendors who will make their own exporters or importers available for Shockwave 3D, and presumably each will have unique qualities.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Animated textures with video
Creating animated textures and applying them to 3D models is a great way to add special or realistic effects to 3D models you create or import into Macromedia Director.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Basic creation and control of surfaces/textures
The number of shaders that a model is the same as the number of meshes in the model. Each mesh therefore only supports ONE shader. The best example of this is a box (if you cannot see a "water" type texture on the box below, right click over it and select ...

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Creating 3D Primitives
“Primitives” are considered to be the building blocks of 3D environments…

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Easy Creation of Primitives Using Custom Handlers
Custom handlers can streamline the process of creating 3D with Lingo. If you are familiar with the idea of functions, a “custom handler” works in the same way to create a kind of “toolkit” of code, which can be called at any time - so you don’t need to repeat it.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cameras: What is a camera?
A camera is a “viewport” in the 3D world. 3D camera do NOT act like “real-world” lens-based cameras (in that there is no lens) – they are the “eyes” of a 3D environment: what people see! A 3D camera simulates what we would expect to see. In essence a 3D camera is a “projection” of 3D objects onto a 2D plane.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cameras: Simple control of the camera using the 3D window
If you drag a 3D member onto the stage in Director, a default camera will be created (unless a camera has been predefined). Alternately, the first available camera in the 3D member will be used for the view.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cameras: Camera Control via Lingo
While the Director 3D window is good for viewing the contents of a 3D cast member and moving the world's primary camera, Lingo provides more flexibility and control.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cameras: Moving/changing camera viewpoints
Here we'll show you how to view the action from different perspectives by having different cameras…

Building a lingo box maze dynamically
This is the first in a series of three short articles that focus on the development of Lingo generated 3D mazes in Macromedia Director—and the common game elements that you might find in such a maze.

Texturing a lingo box maze dynamically
In this part of the series, we'll look at how to do some decorating within the box maze. We'll discuss some tricks to optimize the number of polygons used to display the maze and learn how you can control the appearance with shaders and textures of each wall within the maze.

Camera collision fundamentals
In this part of the series, we'll discuss some basic collision options. We'll also learn how to control the camera.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Lighting: What is 3D Lighting?
Lighting is a vital part of creating Director 3D files. Without lighting nothing is visible! If lighting is not used properly, models can look flat. Therefore you should consider lighting as an important part of the design of a 3d world.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Lighting: Types of lights
There are several different types of lights available in Director – they all offer different characteristics and are more suitable in different situations…

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Lighting: Controlling lights with Lingo
How lights can be added and controlled using Lingo. Note that, for the purpose of highlighting the movement of the lights, they are represented by 3D objects (usually lights are INVISIBLE in the scene).

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Lighting: Creating Shadows
Lights in Director 3D do NOT cast shadows (due to the sheer amount of processing this involves). However, you can create a model to represent the shadow – or “burn” a texture of the shadow in an application such as 3D Studio Max to place on other models. This is an example of a "burnt" shadow texture - it is not generated through the use of light, but pregenerated as a texture beforehand...

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cloning and Grouping 3D Models / Parent & Children: Parents and Children
Typically a 3D world hierarchy would look something like this…

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Cloning and Grouping 3D Models / Parent & Children: Clones
Cloning is a powerful tool that can allow you to download one complex model (such as the “car” featured in the diagram here) and then create several instances of it, rather than needing multiple copies of it. It should be done “before” the movie starts playing as it does involve a performance hit.

Director 3d Tutorial - Defining Shockwave 3D objects
Shockwave 3D cast members are treated very differently to other media types. A typical sprite is an instance of a cast member. A shockwave 3D sprite is a viewport into the 3D world of the cast member. The 3D world is made up of a number of objects (listed below), and these objects have a parent - child relations...

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Jmckell - 3D World Hierarchy
This tutorial shows how a 3D hierarchy is built using a tree data structure. It shows how world transforms are calculated from relative transforms, some object-oriented ideas, and how to generate XML from a tree. It has one directional light and a fixed camera.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - What is Collision Detection?
Collision detection is one of the largest subjects in advanced 3D programming. It is the process of determining whether two polygons are touching or intersecting and taking the most appropriate action to deal with this – usually this involves limiting character movement. Director provides some built-in tools to help out with this: namely the Collision Modifier.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - The Collision Modifier
To enable the models in your 3D cast member to detect contact with each other, you must set up some special model properties. By adding the collision modifier to each model's modifier list and defining a handler to be called when a collision occurs, you can make your models react to collisions in appropriate ways.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Interaction in 3D
Lingo can be used to interact with 3D models, most commonly with the mouse…

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Picking
The key difficulty of designing a 3D interface is that we need an input device that can negotiate 3D – a mouse is by its very nature 2D! Another alternative is the keyboard.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Creating a rollover effect
2D design elements such as rollovers are possible. See the following sample and the Lingo within for an example. This simulates the functionality of the mouse enter and mouse leave Lingo for a standard Director score.

Director 3d Tutorial - Discombo - Easy 3D model creation using fonts
Imagine you have a 2D company logo and need to generate a 3D version of it. Rather than modelling it in 3D Studio Maxor another external 3D application you can use the extrude3D() command to generate the logo from a font…

Director 3d Tutorial - Jmckell - 3D Concepts
Animating in 3D is still done with the techniques covered in incremental, parametric, and recorded animation, but in three axes and using a 3D rendering algorithm.

Director 3d Tutorial - Jmckell - Rendering 3D in Director
There are several ways to render 3D in Director, with the best quality using the Shockwave 3D™ cast member. The other methods are used to show some of the math and programming behind 3D rendering, and come in handy in some situations…

Director 3d Tutorial - Jmckell - 3D Resource Objects
In this tutorial, resource geometry is separated from the 3D hierarchy so that the same resource can be used multiple times in the 3D world. One advantage to this is animating the resource will animate all appearances of it—the three discs in the demo below all use the same disc resource.

Director 3d Tutorial - Jmckell - 3D Camera Movement
The camera orientation is specified by a transform. The renderer gets the camera transform from the 3Dnode that its "camNode" property points to…

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Using the exporter for 3D Studio Max
Director 8.5 includes a Shockwave 3D exporter for 3D Studio Max. It can be found in the 3D Translators folder on the Director 8.5 installation CD. The exporter is a plug-in for 3D Studio Max. It operates from within the 3D Max application and allows you to save work created in Max as a W3D file for use in Shockwave 3D.

Preparing 3D content for Shockwave 3D: Using the 3D SpeedPort Xtra (Converting files)
Once you have installed the Xtra, you can choose files to convert from OBJ format to W3D format, set the conversion options, and then convert the files.

Using primitives
By using Lingo to create simple objects known as primitives, you can add content to your 3D cast members in Macromedia Director at run time. You can add boxes, cylinders, planes, and spheres. This article describes this process and includes three example movies that demonstrate it...

Using backdrops and overlays
This article and the accompanying sample movie, Overlays_and_backdrops.dir, illustrate how to create both a backdrop and an overlay.

Controlling the surface appearance of models
This article demonstrates simple ways to use the shader and texture capabilities of Director 8.5.

Moving models and cameras
In Director 8.5, there is more than one way to move a model or a camera. Models and cameras can be moved relative to themselves, other models, or the world itself. In addition, these objects can be moved with two different Lingo procedures…

Extruding 3D text with Lingo
Macromedia Director 8.5 Shockwave studio lets you create 3D text for your movie using either of the following methods…

Getting oriented to 3D: About 3D cast members and sprites
In Director 8.0 and earlier, a cast member could be any entity that plays a role in the movie: a digitized sound, a graphic, a piece of text, a button, an icon, or even a script or behavior.

Getting oriented to 3D: Inside a 3D world
The relationships among components of the 3D world are somewhat similar to relationships among 2D sprites and cast members…

Getting oriented to 3D: Creating the 3D cast member
A single 3D cast member that will have models added to it with Lingo. If you were creating your own movie, however, you'd have to start by creating an empty 3D cast member.

Getting oriented to 3D: Adding a sphere to the world
This tutorial is learn to Create Sphere behavior, attached to the Create Sphere text sprite, to add a simple sphere to the 3D world.

Getting oriented to 3D: Adding a shader
Once the sphere has been created, click the second line of text ("Create Shader") to add a shader to the sphere with the Create Shader script. That script contains the following Lingo…

Getting oriented to 3D: Adding the texture
Once the shader has been added, click the line of text that says "Add Texture" to run the Create Texture script. That script contains the following Lingo…

Getting oriented to 3D: Animating the sphere
Once the texture has been added, click the line of text that says "Set the Sphere in Motion" to run the Spin script. That script contains the following Lingo…

Getting oriented to 3D: Adding a box
Once the sphere has begun spinning, click the line of text that says "Create Box" to add a simple box using the Create Box script. That script contains the following Lingo…

Getting oriented to 3D: Animating the box
The box is put into motion. Click the line of text that says "Orbit Box" to run the Orbit Box script. That script contains the following Lingo...

Streaming 3D cast members
In Director, 3D cast members contain complex data that consists of several layers: model resources, models, shaders, textures, lights, and more. Because of these layers, 3D cast members can consume large amounts of memory and can take a long time to download on the Internet. Using Lingo, you can set up your 3D Director movies to stream their 3D cast members and begin using them on the Stage before the entire cast member has downloaded.

Performing mesh deformation: Turning off the LOD modifier
The first step in preparing a model for mesh deformation is to make sure that the level of detail (LOD) modifier is disabled. This is because the LOD modifier performs its own changes to the mesh of a model and can conflict with the mesh deform modifier.

Performing mesh deformation: Turning off the LOD modifier
The next step is to add the mesh deform modifier ( #meshDeform ) to the model itself…

Performing mesh deformation: Modifying the vector list
When making changes to a model's vector list, it is a good idea to store a copy of the original vector list in a variable so that you can use it to restore the model to its original state later. Use another copy of the vector list as a working copy that you modify...

Performing mesh deformation: Applying the modified vertices
Finally, the animate1 handler applies the modified vertex list to the model by setting its vertexList property to the variable pTempVertices , which contains the modified vertices...

Optimizing resources with the LOD and SDS modifiers
The level of detail (LOD) and subdivision surfaces (SDS) model resource modifiers are essentially opposites of each other: the LOD modifier reduces the number of polygons in a model, while the SDS modifier adds polygons.

Using 3D particle systems
With the 3D capabilities of Director 8.5 and some Lingo, you can create particle systems for effects such as fire, spraying water, smoke, and fog. A particle system is a 3D object type that defines a group of small objects, the particles, emanating from a source. The particles can be designed to look like water droplets, flames, or smoke particles.

Using picking Lingo
Picking Lingo refers to the Lingo used to enable models in a 3D cast member to receive and respond to mouse clicks. Setting up your 3D cast members to allow for picking models is an important part of including interactivity in your movie. With picking enabled, Lingo can detect which models a user has clicked in your 3D world...

Collision detection
To enable the models in your 3D cast member to detect contact with each other, you must set up some special model properties. By adding the collision modifier to each model's modifier list and defining a handler to be called when a collision occurs, you can make your models react to collisions in appropriate ways.

Playing animations
When a 3D world is created outside Director and imported as a cast member, it may contain animations—called motions in 3D parlance—that can be played back in Director. When motions are present in a 3D world, Lingo is used to play them back in a Director movie. There are two types of motions that can be created in a 3D modeling application and imported into Director 8.5: bones motions and keyframe motions. Each uses a slightly different Lingo technique for playback.

Director Tutorial for The make-up of shockwave 3D casts
Shockwave 3D cast members are treated very differently to other media types. A typical sprite is an instance of a cast member. A shockwave 3D sprite is a viewport into the 3D world of the cast member. The 3D world is made up of a number of objects…

Director Tutorial for Creating and Controlling 3D Text
Create a new movie of Stage size 550 x 200, background colour black….

Director shockwave 3D Lingo
Real-time 3D in Director allows you to create sophisticated interactive 3D environments. To create complex 3D models for Director applications, it's best to use a program like 3D Studio Max. In the last tutorial, we saw how we could create 3D text with Director's text extrusion tool. In this tutorial, we will create 3D with Director using Lingo to create a primitive.

Director Tutorial for Lighting Lingo
In the next set of tutorials we will explore specific elements of controlling a 3D environment. Each will build up from the tutorial before, and we will end up with a sophisticated 3D environment, of which you have total control.

Director Tutorial for Character Control
Before you start, you will need to download the following Director movie (3Denv.dir), which contains a Max-built shockwave 3D cast member.

Director Tutorial for Camera Control
This tutorial builds on the last. So, you will need your completed Director file. If you want to download the completed one…

Director Tutorial for Collision Detection
Tutorial about Collision Detection using the Collision Modifier..

Director 3d Tutorial Collision Detection
Tutorial about Collision Detection using modelsUnderRay…

Director 3d Tutorial Terrain Following
Moving a model over a contoured surface tutorial…

Director Tutorial Cubic VRs and Skyboxes
In this tutorial, we're going to learn 3D Lingo, including: creation of textures, shaders, cameras and their associated properties…

Director 3d Tutorial - Adding Behaviors to 3D Models
If you click on the rotating Box model, the background color of the 3D sprite changes, and a message is displayed telling you which face of which mesh has been clicked…

Director 3d Tutorial - A Balrog in the Browser
This article outlines the process of creating a fire simulation with semi-realistic properties for use in a typical game engine or other real-time 3D environment. Fire simulation is broken down into three major areas: point-sprite generation, image animation, and additional effects (smoke, sparks, and glow). Also discussed are additional solutions for multi-texturing and manipulation of the textures needed to produce the simulation, as well as discussion of directions this work could be extended.