Using a Camera in 3D - Flash 3D: Animation, Interactivity, and Games - page 272

Figure 7.35 Placement of the arch
The placement of the people was made to provide interest and variety. On the surface,
it would seem like a fairly simple task. The reality is that the people proved to be the
challenge of the project. One of the things that was helpful was to have two sizes of
knights, with the larger ones located in the foreground and the smaller ones located in
the middle ground. Even though visually, there is the suggestion of a fairly deep space,
it terms of actual z-coordinates for objects, the range was fairly narrow.
The most challenging aspect is to get the people to pan realistically. They do fine rela-
tive to one another with the appropriate parallax scrolling, but they each also have to
pan with respect to the street. Initially, most of the people appeared to be sliding on
the street during a pan. To have them appear to be grounded requires some trial and
error, and typically involves making adjustments not only in the z-coordinates but also
the y-coordinates as well.
Let's look at the script for bringing the people into the scene. Unlike the village, street
and archway which were loaded dynamically, the people are embedded into the movie
and are brought to the Stage using scene3D.attachMovie . One of the features of this
method is that the movie clip that is being attached can also be given initial properties
at the time of attachment. This provides a convenient way in which to set the location
of each person in 3D space. It is important to remember that the first parameter is the
linkage name of the movie clip symbol in the library to attach to a movie clip on the