The familiar timeline carries
over from earlier versions of Director.
3D
on the Web ... that people can view
All right. So we've established that it's powerful, easy and
expandable. Now let's talk about what's been added since 8.0.
Of course,
at the top of everybody's list of drool-inducing features
is the ability to animate 3D for the Web, add interactivity
to it and deliver it to an incredibly large base of users
who have the capability to view it—200 million, according
to Macromedia. (This may or may not be accurate; but suffice
to say that a whole lot of people have the Shockwave viewer
plugin in their browsers.) See, a lot of companies have developed
technologies to enable interactive 3D content on the Web.
There are Cult 3D and Viewpoint Experience Technology, to
name a couple. And I'm not trying to pick on the companies
that put out these technologies, but, when it comes down to
it, how many people have plugins to access content that you
develop on these platforms? If you're developing content for
a client, does this client care which one is better if few
of their customers can view it?
Nope.
3D objects, just like regular
objects and behaviors, are
added to the Internal Cast list.
Now, I'm
not a big fan of this argument in and of itself. I am a Mac
guy, after all, and Mac guys don't cotton to any ad populem
arguments. If Shockwave 3D were garbage, I'd say forget about
it, use what's best and promote it so that it becomes the
dominant standard. But Shockwave 3D is incredibly easy to
develop; it looks nice on the user end; it's flexible in terms
of bandwidth; and it offers some extra goodies that you might
just be interested in. So, in short, it's worthwhile in and
of itself.
Here's
what I think makes it nice.
First,
as I mentioned, it's easy to develop for. Director 8.5 adds
two new library categories for controlling 3D, as well as
300 new Lingo commands. (Lingo is Director's scripting language.)
So let's say you have a 3D television. You want people to
be able to rotate the television around, zoom in, pan, dolly,
etc. How do you do it? Just as with the 2D library items,
you simply drag the behavior onto the object, adjust your
preferences and click OK. Save it; embed it in your Web page;
and everybody can interact with your 3D television. The same
goes with several other 3D library features. Plus, you can
even use many of the 2D behaviors on 3D objects. Just drag
them onto your 3D object as you would onto a 2D object.
Just as with 2D objects,
3D objects have their own library of behaviors.
3D objects can also use many of the 2D behaviors.
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