3D - Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest

The bad news is that Flashers in general are clueless about 3D. . The good news is that there is a lot of interest and that 3D software is being developed for Flashers. More bad news: what should have been the most eagerly attended session of the conference - the ShockFusion team talking about databases - was less than capacity to start with and quickly depopulated.

Now, I'm not saying that Flashers should get into 3D. I'm not even saying that 3D is a good medium to convey... anything! All I'm saying is that the Flash community has been pissing and moaning for a solid six months now, "I want to do 3D! I want 3D tools! I want to do "kewl" stuff in 3D! I wanna I wanna I wanna!"; and still we are pussyfooting around the shallow waters!

May I be the first to say - emphatically and without qualification:

You need to use Max to do any serious 3D work in Flash. Original thought in 3D involves modeling. As modeling tools, every software package that has been made specifically for Flash is either (1) a toy - a curiosity to construct 3D for 3D' sake with primitives and extrusions of 2D splines - absolutely useless for modeling, or (2) a rendering app. or plugin. No, there are no exceptions.

Flash rock star Mano1 gave a fumbling, near-zero-content presentation to a packed house which basically boiled down to this: "more Flash shapes, bigger file size". Other highlights of the nearly-four-hour 3D session included a demo of motion-capture technology, (you know, the thing you saw on "Curiosities of modern Science" on PBS where there is a guy dressed in a funny suit - dancing in an empty studio with cameras everywhere - and his motions are translated to a 3D model...), an urgent action item for all Flashers with a multi-million-dollar budgets and a need for true-to-life kinematics. Please.

The almost-unbearably patronizing 3D session wore on with a shameless plug for Swift 3D: a "demonstration" of how to make a spinning logo. A spinning logo! Am I the only one who sees something wrong? Am I the middle-aged couple in "Children of the Corn"?

I am really having a crisis over this. It's like when someone in your family is a drug addict and they habitually compromise themselves; and you go back and forth between overwhelming compassion and crushing embarrassment. Maybe it's because 3D is my current study focus: I figure since I am working my ass off to learn Max and 3D in general, everyone else should, too. Maybe I'm just uptight. Maybe I am mistaken in my assumption that character modeling is what 3D is all about. But it really hurts me to see the Flash community stumbling over the simplest issues in 3D like a bunch of asses.

Immediately after the second 3D session got my feathers all ruffled, I had the pleasure of a brief encounter with one of the precious few noteworthy Flash 3D animators on the scene today after the end of the second, grueling FF 3D session. Tomas Landgreen of Titoonic shared a few words with me about 3D character animation.

"You have to be a 3D animator more than a Flash animator."

Cool.

"You have to be a cartoonist even more than a 3D animator."

Brilliant.

These few words meant a lot more to me than hours of droning. Landgreen has produced the most compelling 3D Flash work I have seen. His characters are imbued with real verve. His scenes are convincing without feeling the need for trying to be photo-realistic. Oh, yeah - and he uses Max. Does that tell you anything? Check him out at titoonic.

For Flashers interested in 3D, all I can say is this: Stop posting questions to Flash bulletin boards. The overwhelming majority of 3D Flashers don't know their Character Studio-modeled ass from their Poser-rendered elbow; but that doesn't stop them from talking. Go to webreference.com/3d/ and start studying Max. After you feel like you have a handle on Max (that should be no less than 3 months of hard work), come back to Flash and start experimenting. To date, no one has proven any particular workflow for 3D in Flash. Everyone has their own home-grown solutions. The difference between the 3D design have's and have-not's is that the have's start in a mature 3D modeling environment, (Max is the only one that currently attracts 3rd-party filters that export to Flash).

One more note on 3D and Max: the software costs about $3500; and you will spend a minimum of $600 on plugins before you even learn how to use them. Deal with it. If you want to do 3D in Flash, this is the cost. Period. Every trade has its tools. Flashers have been spoiled by having a dirt-cheap development environment before the 3D craze hit.

God, I've got to get off this subject before I break a capillary.

ShockFusion Team and Database Connectivity

Another shameless plug (some soon-to-be-forgotten e-pliance called the eMarker from Sony. I was eLated to see another eBranded ePliance) started off the session on database connectivity in Flash, a topic that I thought for sure would attract a packed house (turnout spiraled from weak to sparse). I couldn't figure out if interest in the subject was limited because (1) everyone has already found their own solutions after working through the abysmally-documented Flash 4, or (2) Flashers don't care. Just in case it is the latter, let me offer....

Flasher Admonition #8374:

The time is coming - very soon - when absolutely no web information will be hard-coded. Have you heard of the "new" standard XML? (There was actually a point in the conference - Josh Ulm's opening remarks, to be precise - when full auditoriums of Flashers vigorously applauded the idea of thumbing their noses at the dynamic-data-source movement in web development. H-U-G-E mistake. This is precisely the type of thing that makes the grown-up web development world hate Flashers). If you are a strictly visual Flasher (you are part of larger organization, you work primarily in Freehand, a little in Flash, you know how to do a little tweening), you may be able to go your whole life without dealing with dynamic data sources.

For everyone else: if you don't know a scripting language that will connect you to databases, there is still time to learn. For goodness sake, you can learn enough PHP and MySQL to build a guestbook in an afternoon .

Fusion did a very good job of introducing Flashers to the general concepts and workflow of building a Flash frontend for a database-driven app. They also showed their approach to the architecture of the Flash movie. Among other time-saving ideas, they noted that you can save yourself some headaches by simulating script output with a text file (put a test URL-encoded string in a .txt file that is a sample result from a script that queries your database. Use this file as your testing script through development; then just change your load variable call when you go live).

Day One
Flash Forward 2000
Hey CoolAid! -- Oh Yeeeeeeah!