Using a Camera in 3D - Flash 3D: Animation, Interactivity, and Games - page 268

Figure 7.31 Opening screen of village3D.swf
We can see from playing the movie, as well as from the script itself, what the objects
are. There are environmental objects that include the village background, the street,
and an archway. There are also people in the form of eight knights standing guard,
a protector knight, and the queen. Each of these need to be placed in 3D space. The
combination of these 2D drawings placed within a 3D space presents some interesting
challenges that must be dealt with, not the least of which is the scale of the respec-
tive objects. In a fully 3D software program such as Autodesk Maya or CINEMA 4D, all
of the objects would be created to scale with one another. This is clearly impractical
within the Flash environment. We will have objects at different scales that must visually
appear as if they are at the same scale.
Let's begin with the village and street images. As Figure 7.32 shows, our village scene
has a rather flat perspective and almost no street visible, so we decided to add a
street that had a much greater sense of depth. Rather than physically merging them
in Photoshop, we decided to keep them as separate images and bring them together
in Flash since the file size of each was already quite large. Figure 7.33 shows the two
images loaded into Flash at different depths. Since we want to be able to pan and
zoom, we have to treat the village and street like any other object and provide coor-
dinates for them. Since both images have the same width, the x-values are the same.
The difference in y-values was quickly obtained knowing the dimensions of the images.
Different z-values were assigned so there would be no problems with the depth sorting.