I’ve been looking at some flash sites, and I’ve seen a lot of “3d effects”, but not 3d as in shaded cubes and spheres, 3d as in lined boxes and rotating circles. Particularly what you see at 2advanced.com (I know, I’m just using it as an example). You see in their logo at the very beginning, the 3d rotation of the flat circle, and towards the intitiation the boxes get smaller, then rotate to form into the menus. I was just curious to what program could achieve 3d type effects like that, or how I would go about doing that.
You might want to check out swift 3d and flash.
I have swift 3d, but the closest thing to “flat 3d” is a torus and planes. :-\ How would I go about doing it in swift
That’s where flash comes in, some of it could be done with regular motion and shape tweens and some of it is done through actionscripting.
sorry but eg i love your new footer!
the source .fla to the 2advanced intro logo is available. it’s all done with tweens and masks. you can find it on the forum if you search “2advanced”.
Ever hear of a program called Plasma? made by those crazy guys that made 3DStudio Max? Well, you can do really advanced 3D with that. Let me find some examples of stuff that I made with it. keep in mind that I am in no way 3D competent, I know the basics kind of heh.
http://www.dujodu.com/plasma/boarder.html
http://www.dujodu.com/plasma/button.swf
http://www.dujodu.com/plasma/FINALE.swf <-- pretty funny/pathetic (the first thing I made)
I did not make the guy model, because I have no idea how to do the bone structure (IK, it might be called?) but I made the board and I made the maze. Everything was made in plasma. the “button.swf” (it can also be seen at the end of the “boarder.html link”) was made using a different shading method than the others. Plasma is pretty cool, and I THINK that there is a demo available at discreets website.
lol, awesome AP 
I’ve done some 3D routines that include (flat) shading. You can check it out here: http://kilianconsult.dk/flash/dodecahedron/
As for (Phong-)shading a sphere, I’d say that that’s pretty much impossible to do in Flash. You’d need to calculate the light on the sphere for each pixel drawn.
I haven’t tried Swift so I don’t know what that’s capable of…
swift mixed with some flash tweens will get you the effect you desire and it will not be very hard. Plasma is cool, but as far as working and integrating with flash swift has it beat. But the advanced modelling in plasma is cool.
Bad thing about swift is your output is not true 3d…meaning you could not use it in director. But for what you are doing it is a good solution.
Wow, thanks for all the info. Your pieces look good from what I see. I have 3dsm, but I don’t believe I’ve ever tried plasma out.
I’m pretty sure there are tools for 3DSM that allow you to export as a .swf, but I’m not completely sure.
swift has a import utility that will allow you to bring max models into swift and texture them and animate them for flash
Nice, I was not aware of that.
edit: wow! I just checked out the electric rain site, there is some very impressive stuff going on with that! Last time I looked at Swift 3D You could basically make cubes and spheres, heh… things sure have changed.
