ANIMATIONS SOFTWARE : GRAPHICS & ANIMATION SOFTWARE : FLASH
Director property lists by object - This section lists Director properties and whether they can be set…
3d max to Director
Get a quick start in optimizing your existing 3ds max content for the Web with this 3D Quick Start Guide: 3ds max to Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio. Learn how to integrate your Discreet 3ds max files into Director Shockwave Studio and optimize your content for Web publication.
Director Basics Tutorial
Director is a multimedia authoring environment for creating dynamic, interactive content, e.g., multimedia presentations, animations, and interactive multimedia apps…
Director Tile-Based Scrolling in Director
Tile-based scrolling has been used for ages by the video games industry, yet it's only been available in Director since version 8. This technique offers a lot of advantages, and applies particularly well to Shockwave because it allows for minimal loading time.
Macromedia - Multimedia Created in Director
Find out how to integrate all the components in a massive training presentation—with Director.
Macromedia - Using External Media to Create Cast Members in Director MX
This tutorial discusses methods for creating new cast members "on the fly" using external media.
People artcenter - Director basics
Director is a multimedia authoring tool that has sound, graphics, video, Flash, and animation capabilities. In addition, it has a plug-in architecture that enables the user to add capabilities such as the serial communications that can be used to work with sensors, touch screens, etc.
Director Creating Projectors Tutorial - Herts - Creating a Projector
A projector is a file that becomes an application in its own right like a multimedia CD. It doesn't need another application to play. These files are often used to display full screen movies on computer terminals in public places i.e. as part of an exhibition in a museum. Because the movie is no longer a Director file the user will not be able to access any of the editing tools and will only be able to play the movie.
Fbe unsw - Introduction: How to use these tutorials
The tutorials in this site cover Director basics to advanced use of 3D and Lingo. This page will cover some of the conventions…
Fbe unsw - The Director Interface
Director's interface is designed around a movie / theatre metaphor. The media elements in a Director project are called the Cast members, they interact on a Stage, the Score keeps track of the media over time, and you, as the multimedia designer, become the Director of a movie.
Fbe unsw - The Bouncing Ball
Animating objects along a path.We will start by creating a new movie and setting the Stage size.
Fbe unsw - The Shrinking Ball
Animating sprite size…
Fbe unsw - More Animated Balls
The next series of tutorials animate other sprite properties. The diagram to the right shows the Property Inspector. The Property Inspector allows you to set properties for various elements of your movie, including sprites, cast members and even the movie itself.
Fbe unsw - Animating with PhotoShop
This exercise uses Director to animate changing images. We are going to use PhotoShop to create our animated content.
Fbe unsw - Animating Multiple Images & Alignment
Here tutorial for Animating Multiple Images & Alignment…
Fbe unsw - Design and Interactivity Issues
This tutorial's main focus is on the key principles that make the layout of each scene in your Director presentations visually strong. The result will be a presentation on graphic design and can be seen here.
Fbe unsw - Structuring Presentations
This tutorial uses the hierarchical/tree type structure…
Fbe unsw - Publishing Director Executables
Director movies are cross platform. You can take a DIR file made with a Windows Director and open it with Director on the Macintosh. Projectors, however, are platform specific. Projectors are self executables that allow you to run your movies without the need for Director or any other software to be installed on the computer.
Fbe unsw - Publishing Shockwave movies
Distributing Director movies for web delivery requires the files to be converted into a Shockwave (dcr) format. This publishing process compresses the data in the movie and optimise it for web playback…
Fbe unsw - Understanding transparencies
Director's ink effects allow you to apply a variety of transparencies to sprites. Two of these are: Background Transparent…
Fbe unsw - Using Intel Web Design Effects
This tutorial uses an Xtra that came with Director 7 but was discontinued in future versions. Intel use to have a page on their site about it, but it is no longer there. So, if you have Director 7 and want to try this tutorial…
Fbe unsw - Palette Transitions
The next two tutorilas use palette transitions, which is a gradual change from colours in one palette to the colours in another. Palette transitions have one major drawback, they only work if your computer is set to display to 256 colours.
Fbe unsw - Colour Cycling Tutorial
In our first set of tuts we animated coloured balls, getting Director to cycle through colours. Now we will cycle through a range of colours at one time to create movement - the effect a bomb going off behind the fbe.
Users bloomfield - Multimedia Director Tutorial
This tutorial teaches the basics for: Motion tweening animation, Difference between cast members & sprites, Interactivity, navigation and rollovers, Importing and placement of graphics, Altering graphics in the Paint window, Importing and running video, Importing and playing audio, Looping with "go the frame" scripting, and more!
Herts - Using cue points in Director's Tempo channel
Open your buttons/destinations movie and import the sound file. Drag the sound cast onto audio channel 1 at the red destination, so when you click on the red button you get a red screen and the sound plays.
Herts - Behaviors
You are going to use behaviors to make your rollover buttons. To complete the project you need the cursor to change to a pointing finger when it is rolled over a button. A cast script is exclusive to the cast member you attach it to. Every time you use that cast member the script comes with it. That script cannot be used independently from the cast it was written for...
Herts - Basic on-stage animation
For this exercise either open your figure movie from the basics tutorial and delete the Score, remembering to delete any transitions, or make a new background and figure in Paint.
Herts - Animating sprite movement using the score
In this tutorial the figure moves onto the Stage from off screen. This method uses the principle, that has just been demonstrated, of a start frame, end frame and intermediate frames. The start position is defined by positioning the sprite just off-stage.
Herts - Animating the shape of a sprite
Using the same principle you can animate the shape of a sprite. The object of this exercise is to make the sprite grow bigger. Delete Sprite 2 from the previous exercise. Drag your figure onto the Stage again to a central position. Click on the last frame of Sprite 2 in the Score, make sure no other frames are highlighted. Click and hold on the bottom right handle of the sprite and drag it away from the sprite, you will see it enlarge.
Herts - Keyframes
To take on-stage animation further you can create keyframes, the animation path can be broken up to move in a series of directions. Keyframes are the main points of change which would be drawn by the animator whilst the assistants draw all the intervening frames. In this case Director is your assistant.
Herts - Bouncing a ball
Use the knowledge you have gained to date to create an animation of a ball bouncing. It starts in the top left of the screen and bounces in diminishing heights across the screen as if dropped.
Herts - Animating using the Property Inspector
So far we have animated movement and changes in shape by adjusting the Sprite directly on the Stage, for more accuracy and more options it is possible to make changes in the Property Inspector. To demonstrate this we will make some alterations to our movie so that when the ball hits the ground it squidges.
Herts - Introducing the control panel
The ball may not be easy to see because of the speed it is travelling. The next step is to use the control panel to help make some alterations. To open this window select Control Panel from the Window pull down menu.
Herts - Film Loops
A film loop is a single cast member containing the whole, or sections, of an already constructed movie.
Herts - Registration Points
A registration point is the point from which the movement of a sprite takes place. You have seen that movement can be generated by dragging a dot from the centre of a sprite. This dot is the registration point of a Cast Member. The default registration point is in the centre of the image. The centre is not always the right place to generate the movement from.
Herts - Animating Cast Members
There are times when you will need to animate a sprite by changing its cast member, for example if the sprite needs to change shape in a way that is more complex than the previous techniques can handle.The Cast to Time command allows you to animate between several cast members.
Herts - Space to Time
This technique allows you to change your Cast Member and animate movement. Using Cast to Time you can animate movement using a path created by dragging the dot in the normal way, what you can't do is use the same Cast Member more than once, Space to Time allows you to do this.
Herts - Consolidation
The object of this exercise is to consolidate your knowledge by using the techniques demonstrated in this tutorial to make a running figure. The figure will be running on the spot and the background will move past giving the impression the figure is running forward.
Herts - Publishing
Publishing a movie means making a Shockwave movie. This is a file that plays in a web browser as long as the shockwave plug-in is downloaded.
Herts - Importing Cast members
You have seen how you can draw your own cast members with Paint, now let's look at importing cast members from external files.
Herts - Demonstrating the difference between Stage and Area transitions
Using Paint make a square of colour and call it box. Move your figure to the right of the Stage and place your Score and Cast windows to the left…
Herts - Transitions
You can add transitions to the Score to fade or wipe between one point in your movie and another. There is a transition channel in the Score's effects channels…
Herts - Inks
Graphic sprites have an ink type, this defaults to Copy. If you look at the sprite information for your background, Sprite 1, you will see the word Copy after the co-ordinates…
Herts - Looking at sprites
To demonstrate the difference between a Cast Member and a Sprite drag the Cast Member onto the Stage a second time, resize it to a small size. While it is still highlighted read its information, it is still derived from Cast Member background so we get the same cast member information, the second line, by the red icon tells us that this is Sprite 2...
Herts - The Cast
The Cast is everything you use to create your movie; graphics, text, video, audio etc. Each individual item is called a Cast Member. Click the Cast Window icon on the Toolbar and the Cast window will appear, titled Internal Cast, it is internal because it is created and stored within the movie. It is also possible to import Casts from other movies to use in the movie you are working on.
Herts - The Stage
The Stage is the blank canvas on the screen where the movie will play. To view the Stage, or to remove it from the screen click the Stage icon on the toolbar. The Stage is the white box in the window below.
Herts - The Toolbar
The Toolbar offers shortcuts to many of Director's windows and functions. These will be explained and come into use as you work through the tutorials. The Toolbar sits at the top of the screen under the main menu headings.
Director Tutorial: Getting Started
With Director running, select New Movie from the File menu so that you are starting afresh…
Director Tutorial: The Playback Head and the frame
You'll probably have noticed that when you run a movie in Director, the playback head (the vertical red line in the score) moves horizontally to the right 'reading' and displaying the sprites in each frame on the stage…
Director Tutorial: The Cannon
Drag the cannon graphic onto the stage and place it in an appropriate place near the bottom. Have a look in the score and make sure that it looks something like this…
Director Tutorial: Tests and Truth
You may have noticed that moving the mouse too far to the left and right will make the cannon disappear off the screen. This will be especially evident if your stage size is smaller than your monitor resolution. Fortunately, it is possible to keep the cannon on the stage, but still follow the mouse. This is achieved by using one of the fundamental programming concepts, the truth test...
Director Tutorial: The Invader
The invader is going to move horizontally and "bounce" off the edges of the screen. Every time it bounces it will move a few pixels down the screen. Drag one of the invader cast members onto the stage. Make sure it is in frame 1, and put it in sprite channel 3. (We are going to reserve channel 2 for the bullet)...
Director Tutorial: Messages to The Bullet
Now at least our invadirs movie is starting to look like a game. It's even visually recognisable as space invaders even though there is no gameplay yet. If you've got this far and your brain is still working, then I'm quite sure that you're really eager to take the project a step further so that you can actually shoot and destroy the aliens. Take it easy though, some things should not be rushed into, and OO design is one of them.
Director Tutorial: Messages between Objects
Great going so far, although we really want the shoot message to come from somewhere other than the message window. Remember the message window will not be there in the finished product. We also need something easy for the user so that they can shoot quickly. We could use the mouse button, but I'd rather not because if you click outside Director accidentally the movie will stop running and you'll bring some other application to the front. This is irritating (believe me) so it might be better to use the keyboard...
Director Tutorial: Repetition
We have to test for collisions with several sprites. The most obvious thing to do might be to repeat the intersection test over and over like this…
Director Tutorial: Lists
So far we have a playable game, which is more or less what we want, but in the back of our minds we should always expect that no matter how simple a project might seem, it might get more complicated later, especially if we go on adding things indiscriminately. You might already have an idea of the mess that can evolve in a multimedia project without due care and attention.
Director Tutorial: Displaying the Score
Further to the discussion of puppets in the previous lesson, we now move onto scripting another kind of Director object 'from the outside', a field cast member. For displaying text. Director relies on two cast member types, fields and richtext. Director 7 has superceded richtext cast members with text cast members. So that those with Director 6 can benefit, and to avoid obsolete information I have chosen to use fields to display the players score and lives.
Director Tutorial: STOP!
Why the darker background colour? I wanted to wake you up a bit for this lesson as it is very important. I have been referring continually to reuseability, scope and various other esoteric technical terms. For the sake of making the code easier to understand I have not been as careful and thorough with this as I could and should have been. That's OK, because I know what I'm doing. You don't, however, so I am taking a whole lesson to emphasise this and polish what we have so far, to 'clean up' as it were, before we go on.
Director Tutorial: Caught in the Crossfire
We're about to introduce some extra complexity into the game and if you are to retain your sanity and sense of self worth it is important that as many loose ends are tied up as possible before the new stuff throws the whole thing out of control.
Director Tutorial: Did I Shoot Six Bullets or Only Five?
Now that we have done the preparatory work we can think about multiple bullets. There are several strategies that could work here. For what I have in mind there will have to be specific sprite channels set aside for bullets. Right now we're using channel 2 Let's assume that 21-25 are also used for bullets. Copy the bullet sprite and paste it into those channels.
Director Tutorial: Sharing Data for Fun and Profit
A more sophisticated technique for managing complexity is for objects to each have a copy of a pointer to the same shared list or object, something like a global variable but more tidy. Global variables are anathema to purist Object-Oriented programmers. Data always belongs somewhere. Using global variables merely indicates that you haven't thought about which object should be responsible for that data, or perhaps (excuses excuses) that you have designated the top level of organisation (the Director player application) as an object and the globals merely extend its properties.
Director Tutorial: Getting connected
In earlier versions of this tutorial, this lesson discussed the score and the concept of states. Now, that content has been moved into the next lesson. Apologies for any confusion.
Director Tutorial: Getting in a state
The game is working pretty well by now, except that nothing really happens when you have cleared all the invaders. There is also an error message when the cannon gets hit by a bullet. Normally when you've killed all the baddies, you would expect to see a new screen with the words "Next Level" or some such for a few seconds, then the game would start again and be more difficult. If you got hit by a bullet. you'd see a different screen "You're dead" or something, and if you had been shot several times you would proceed to a 'game over' screen.
Director Tutorial: Packaging a script for easy reuse
One of the most often-mentioned advantages of object-oriented design is that classes are reuseable. If you design a button behavior which is general enough for all the buttons in one project, the chances are good that you can use the same button class in several other projects...
Director Tutorial: New Improved Invaders
Things are going well, but the rain of bullets is not very encouraging, especially when the invaders get to steal them all…
Director Tutorial: Lives and Levels
Right, now we're in a position to add lives and levels to the game. You'll need to make a seperate field cast member for each of these, put them on an appropriate place on the screen. arrange the lives field sprite from frame 2 to 4 in channel 18, the levels sprite from frame 2 to 5 in channel 19. Make sure they have the same number display script as the score field and then proceed...
Fun with TCP/IP Sockets
The relationship between Director and TCP/IP has extended far back to the early days, when an XCMD from the Hypercard world allowed for the creation of some simple sockets. When Macromedia released the Multiuser XTRA and Server combination, many doors were opened including the ability for the Multiuser XTRA to open connecting...
Communicating With Flash Code Objects
I'm a long time Director user (since v4), who has subsequently transitioned to using Flash. This is more in response to client needs as much as anything else I guess, but I'm still a fan of Director. Where once I would have written an application in Director, and, perhaps included some Flash sprites to perform certain functions...
