With Flash 5 actionscripting stirring up more dust in the Flash
developers' community than an Oklahoma tornado, the mad dash to do
anything with 3D seems to have at least temporarily subsided
(or maybe the subject is finally drifting to the back waters where it
belongs). In any case, easy workflows for producing valuable Flash
3D content remain elusive.
What's worse, as Flashers continue to grope for anything that looks
even remotely organic, users' expectations rise steadily. By this
point in web history, surfers expect to see live-motion, video-quality
real-time rendering. In Flash. That loads in 10 seconds or less.
On version 3 browsers.
Believe it or not, we can do it...
First off, I did not invent this. I saw a simpler execution of this at
the
Oakley Products
website, where my buddy works. They had a pair of ultra-cool sunglasses
that rotated between three positions based on the position of the mouse
pointer. So I thought, "If three positions work, why not
twenty?"; and since there was no one present to say
"Because you can't have that many bitmaps in a Flash file,"
I went ahead and tried it.
The basic concept is this:
Create the illusion of rotating an object in real time
The object is rendered in photorealistic detail
This is possible because the object is actually a series of
photographs.
The perceived rotation is really just cycling through these
carefully composed photographs.
This project starts with photography. I knew that I wanted to have 20
images, each differentiated by equal rotations, the sum of which would
be a full circle. So I drew a guide on a piece of paper. (I did this
in Freehand, shown below, but you could use anything that will draw
a polygon, e.g. a 59¢ protractor).
