Amorphium Pro - Con't - Page 17

Amorphium Pro has a good set of standard features for viewing, selection, and animation. Figure 20-24 shows a context menu for a mesh sphere, which has a large number of options arranged in a sensible hierarchy. This is another feature reminiscent of much more expensive 3D packages.

Amorphium does a good job at rendering in any medium. Figure 20- 25 took a matter of seconds to render at full size and full color. It is worth mentioning that this is the very first model I made, while still disoriented and skeptical. It still only took about 5 to 10 minutes to make, and came out with satisfactory results.

The cool thing about rendering SWF is that Amorphium Pro will composite all shadows and render them on any surface, just like a regular raytracing renderer for bitmap output. This gives an added depth to SWF stills and animations that you might prefer to plain gradients or flat colors. Amorphium Pro has more parameters for rendering SWF than any other application I've seen so far.

While a professional 3D artist is not going to throw away his polygon modeling tools for Amorphium Pro, the application definitely lives up to the promise of providing an intuitive, easy-to-use modeling paradigm for 2D artists. There is no reason you couldn't start creating interesting, organically shaped 3D right out of the box.

Another way to look at Amorphium Pro is that the interactive tools are a great addition to your 3D toolbox. I can imagine a lot of applications for using Amorphium Pro as a last stop to touch up, paint, and texture a model. In addition, it is a great tool for assembling, painting, animating, and rendering models that you build in another application like Nendo and Strata. If you want to produce high-quality SWF 3D in an environment with lots of features, and you can afford to spend a little bit of money on a 3D tool, Amorphium Pro is definitely worth a look.

What to Take Away from This Chapter

A survey of the current state of Flash 3D is worth its own section of a book, so I won't pretend to cover it comprehensively in the closing notes of this chapter. I do want to point out, however, that we are still at the very dawn of time concerning Web 3D. In addition, Flash is not the only medium to convey 3D on the Web.

The aspiring Flash 3D artist could easily be discouraged by the astronomical gap in function and price between established SWF- native tools like Swift 3D and the next-best workflow. At present, the next-best workflow seems to be industrial-strength tools that support SWF output plug-ins, like 3D Studio Max. If you haven't priced this class of tools, think "six months' mortgage."

The good news is that the gap is filling in slowly, and a smooth gradient of price ranges and functionality for the Flash developer is on the distant horizon. You can now export SWF directly from Poser using the Poser Pro Pack, which is far from low cost, but it does represent grown-up 3D functionality closer to the price range I like. Between the first draft and the first revision of this chapter, I got my first look at Amorphium Pro, which is, to my knowledge, the first real 3D modeling and animation package with native support for SWF output.

As a parting shot on 3D, I have assembled a list of big issues in Flash 3D to think about as you decide whether to plunge headfirst into this world.

• This chapter doesn't scratch the surface of the huge collection of topics in 3D; it merely points to a few places where you might like to start scratching.

• While 2D animation in Flash has its roots in traditional ink- and-cell animation, 3D is more closely linked to film. The sets of ideas that govern the two are more different than they are alike.

• You have probably heard Flash developers talk about how important it is to start with a storyboard for an animation, and this is, in fact, necessary to create coherent animations. This is exponentially more important in 3D. Starting a 3D animation within the 3D software package is roughly equivalent to starting production of a motion picture by rounding up 150 movie union employees on a multimillion dollar soundstage and saying, "I dunno… what do you feel like making a movie about? Who should we call to star?"

• The development of 3D for Flash is in a peculiar place right now. There definitely is no standard workflow or standard toolset. There is not even unanimous agreement that 3D content in Flash should be vectors and not raster movies. There will be more development before the dust settles.

• A lot of Flashers waste a lot of energy talking about expensive 3D packages. Expensive tools don't offer any advantage to 3D artists who aren't so well versed in the basics of modeling, animation, texturing, and so on, that they acutely feel the limitations of low-and no-cost tools like Strata, Nendo, and Blender.

• Finally, 3D tools are a means to an end. Good 3D animation (the film Toy Story, for example) begins with clear reasoning for why 3D is an advantageous medium for the story or user task. All 3D doesn't need to be superslick character animation with a brilliant story, but all 3D does have to present an advantage in order to be useful.

Amorphium Pro - A Different Approach - Page 16
Macromedia Flash 5 Developer's Guide