As a brief intro to texturing I’ve put together this demo to show you the effects that can be done when adding an image or animation to a 3D model.
On Texturing
The color information from the texture image is used with the lighting effects to provide the look. By pressing, “Add” you can place a new texture on the selected side of the cube. You might have to rotate it to see the result. If you change the lighting modes by pressing on the cube you will notice that the new material does not change in appearance as much as the other sides. The new material is affected by the color change of the lights but it is not being defined in the same way as the other sides.
Flash Vector Graphics
Flash is a very neat technology for doing a lot with vector graphics and motion animation. Being able to combine this with 3D can make some nice effects. Vector animations are usually smaller in size than other frame based animations so they work well as 3D textures.
Creating the Demo
First, being more of a 3D generalist and programmer/animator than a 2D vector artist guy, I looked for some nice artwork I could make use of. I found these great bird vector graphics, which I liked very much at http://www.pinkmoustache.net/page/2/ Thank you for making these available for use!
Next I made a small SWF file with the Adobe Flash CS3 authoring environment and added a brief vector animation to one of the birds, some buttons and code and then proceeded to get the SWF with the birds in it to talk to the SWF with the cube in it. The two of them did not want to talk; the cube was compiled with the Flex environment and was built using Away3D so perhaps that might have something to do with them ignoring each other’s requests for communication. In any case I’m very thankful for the Internet and this article http://www.scottgmorgan.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/11/accessing-document-class-of-externally-loaded-swf-with-as3/ for showing some needed clues.
After a long series of swear words briefly interrupted by some ActionScript coding I got the two SWF files communicating and working properly. Just kidding – actually I like ActionScript coding, it wasn’t that tough to do, and I don’t swear, but it makes for a better story.
