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

[John Foust]

At 01:00 PM 10/20/99 -0700, Michael Penne wrote:

>Since 3d programs already are designed to handle

>shading, lighting, morphing, etc. so well, what I

>would really kill for is a batch processor to trace

>the bitmaps, along with replacing shaded areas in the

>bitmaps with flash gradients. (Streamline will batch,

>but resulting files still need much work to be

>useful.)


That's why I think that autotracing is a dead-end path.  It's trying to

get blood from a turnip.  The information you want to preserve is

known or calculable inside the 3D program.  A great deal of 3D info

is lost once it is reduced to a bitmap form.  That's not to say that

you wouldn't get better results in autotracing after running the

bitmap frames through some image-processing steps, like posterizing

or otherwise reducing the number of colors.


There have been very few 3D renderers aimed at producing a wide

variety of styles in a structured drawing format (Illustrator, Flash, 

PICT drawing, Windows metafiles, etc.).


For fun, take a look at Viewpoint LiveArt at 

<http://liveart.viewpoint.com/>.  It produces bitmaps, unfortunately,

but a product like this could produce a wide variety of artistically

styled, non-photorealistic renderings of 3D objects, and those bitmaps 

might autotrace in interesting ways.  It looks like they're offering

a $99 bundle to get Nichimen Nendo for Windows, an entry-level 3D modeler

<http://www.nichimen.com/nendo/> along with LiveArt.


I worked for Viewpoint until June 30.


- John




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