Architecture Fly-Through in Shockwave 3D
In This Chapter
- Storyboarding
- Building the Model
- Naming Models
- Lighting
- Texture Mapping
- Setting Up the Camera
- Exporting Options
- A Piece of the Pie
- Working in Director
- File Size Considerations
- Score Setup
- Color and Visibility
- Redrawing Issues
- Adding Lingo
- Testing"Test Early, Test Often"
- Projector Testing
- Web Testing
- Xtra Embedding
- Graphic Dithering
- Completing the Movie
This chapter is the first hands-on example in this book. It walks you through the process of creating a Shockwave 3D file. For this chapter, we will use the example of a fly-through house. Imagine that your house is for sale and that you want to put more than a photo of it on the Internet. In Shockwave 3D, you can easily create an interactive, fly-through version that allows viewers to literally see the inside of your house.
When building a 3D model, you should first storyboard it, then 3D model it, and then move your model into Director via the Shockwave exporter. After your model is in Director, you can apply behaviors or Lingo to it to make it interactive, or to give the interface a design. Finally, once you've finished it, you'll export it to the Internet for delivery.
Note, in the previous chapter, I showed you how behaviors can accomplish complicated tasks. In this chapter, I show you how to build the fly-through house model without behaviors. Leave it to me to task you with the hard stuff before you get half way through the book! Don't worry. I walk you through the details step by step.
Storyboarding
The first step in building a 3D model is to storyboard the model. Depending on your 3D modeling program, storyboarding (or drawing a model) can be precise or it can just be a rough sketch, such as those you might draw on a napkin or scrap piece of paper [3.1]. If you have a 3D modeling application that allows you to trace or extrude scanned in images, then you might want to draw your model with ruler accuracy. This creates perfectly straight lines, which makes extruding them easy. In the fly-through house example, the sketch is just a reference for the model and was not traced.
Figure 3.1. A sketch of the initial floor plan of the fly-through house.When drawing your 3D models, try to sketch out as much detail as possible, so that when you begin working in the modeling application, you can create the objects the first time through the process of creating the model. In this example, you should sketch where you want the windows, doors (and how they open), and the places you want lighting.