Explaining Advanced 3D in Flash

Flash & 3D

Flash and 3D. These two topics have raised many thoughts and comments over the last few years. I remember spending far too many hours with Flash 3 tracing over 3D objects to create a spinning cube. Then there was creating a 3D page turn in Flash 4. However with the advent of Swift 3D (by Electronic Rain) the making of these 3D animation's has become a lot easier for us designers.

Swift 3D provides us with a good environment for developing 3D based animation's, however there are some major drawbacks with this great software. The most obvious issue is that Swift 3D does not come with a CUBE tool. The primary reason for Swift 3D was to animate 3D Text, and company logos (which can be imported from Freehand or Illustrator and extracted). I find that I'm very seldom asked to animate simple objects, but more commonly asked for complex animation's, some of which come from television 3D.

I'm not going to write a tutorial on using Swift 3D - the manual does a very good job of that. What I'm going to talk about is developing slightly more complex animation's, esp importing 3DS files, and creating slightly more complex 3D, and I'll have a little comparison of 3D files.