Re: FLASH: Interfacing a 3D App with the Flash Synthetizer C Library

[John Foust]

At 07:26 PM 10/17/99 -0600, Antoine Valot wrote:

>I found this Through John Croteau's site:

>http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/flash/

>Now, if someone hacked up an implementation of this for the output of a

>3D app, shouldn't we be able to export pure 3d to flash?

>Am I right, or am I right?

>Is that what IdeaWerks is doing with Vectra, basically?

>Couldn't we do it public domain?


No, it's much more complex than that.  Think about it.  If you

have a 3D object composed of polygons floating in 3D space,

some of the polygons are occluded by others.  First of all,

you wouldn't want the hidden polygons to be stored in your

Flash file.  If you can't see them, you probably don't want

them.  You might want them for editing, but you don't want 

the end-user to bother to download them.


In a 3D scene, you probably need a light source to affect the

shading of the 3D object.  As the object turns, the brightness

of each polygon changes relative to the light.  Your 3D object

may be composed of hundreds of polygons, and groups of adjacent

polygons might all be lit at the same brightness.  Do you want

this tool to export one Flash polygon, or dozens of the

same color?  What about representations of smoothing or hardness?

What you might really want is a cartoon-like shading of the

object, not the literal 3D polygons.


Paul left SGI in the last round of lay-offs, too.


- John




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