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The Interface is flexible, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say intuitive, it's doesn't take very long to figure out which windows and tools to keep on screen to maximize your efficiency. Traditional Director movies rely heavily on score window, where all the sprite timings, animation tweening, and behaviors were dropped into place. If you are planning on using Director for creating 3D application, your primary interface tools include a ShockWave 3D Window, the Properties Window, and the Lingo Script Window. While there are some basic built in behaviors that you can drop onto your 3D world, developing any non-trivial 3D application will require learning the Lingo programming language. In my opinion this is a very powerful advantage, allowing you to produce some very complex programs, perhaps even rivaling professional 3D games. While Lingo itself is a fairly early language to master, it will take some time to master the hundreds of 3D specific functions and parameters. Currently that task is quite challenging with a serious void in quantity and quality of available tutorials, and books on the subject.
So what exactly can you do in 3D? Just about anything your creative mind can dream up! The list of features for 3D is very impressive for this first version. Built on Intel's 3D format, your Shockwave3D apps can take advantage of fast streaming of Multi-Resolution meshes (AKA - MRM or LOD). Download streaming of 10,000 or so polygons per second is common on fast connections, with the models being visible early, with increasing detail still streaming in, or as the camera gets closer to the model. Built in Bones deformation animations, as well as Keyframe animation are built into the W3D format, and fully controllable in Lingo. This feature is a boon to developers, as it allows users to produce character animations inside of their favorite 3D program, which will play, and be controllable inside of Shockwave. A free 3D Studio Max plugin is included with Director 8.5, which exports to W3D format. In addition there is a Director 8.5 Xtra, which allows conversion of OBJ files inside of director. Most of the major 3D companies have released, or announced W3D format support, including Caligari trueSpace, Maxon Cinema4D, Curious Labs Poser, and Alias|Wavefront Maya. Okino graphics has also announced that its industry leading PolyTrans 3D format converter will soon support W3D.
The Particles System built into Shockwave3D allows users to produce special effects such as smoke, dust, fire, flowing water, sparks, vapor and explosions. Add to that the numerous lighting controls, and camera effects, such as Fog, and you have all the tools you should need for building a jaw dropping real-time 3D experience!
Lingo 3D functions include full control of your models, lights, particles, and camera including collision detection events, shaders, deformations, and rendering options. Hardware 3D acceleration via OpenGL, DirectX, or via software is automatic, and user controllable.
If these built in, standard features aren't enough for you, 3rd party tools have already been developed, with more sure to follow. Havok has released a Physics Xtra allowing interactive, realistic motion physics and collisions. Both face2face and Famous3D have released their ShockWave lip-synch, and facial animation software as Director Xtras.
One other important advancement that comes with this version of Director is it's multiuser functionality. Running the MultiUser server, and controlled via built in behaviors, and Lingo is the ability to connect, and communicate with up to 2,000 simultaneous users. Building 3D chat rooms, multiplayer 3D games and real-time instructor controlled classes are some of the potential applications you could build.
In conclusion Director's 3D functionality is definitely a huge advancement of a product, which was already a very impressive multimedia-authoring environment. This release should prove to be a significant milestone in evolution of 3D on the web. I am particularly pleased to see that the 'pay per 3D stream' licensing model embodied in other Web 3D platforms is not the way Macromedia sees the future of 3D on the web. I eagerly wait to you what YOU - the Creative 3D community will produce with this powerful new tool!
Macromedia.com
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