Depth Cues: Creating the Illusion of Depth - Flash 3D: Animation, Interactivity, and Games - page 35

Step 12: Save and test movie
This completes this exercise. Save your file. Choose Control > Test Movie.
Exercise Summary
Traditional animators use similar shading techniques to make cartoon characters appear
more three-dimensional. It is a combination of darkening a fill color and brushing it
onto a shape. The Color Mixer creates and adjusts colors. The HSB color space provides
an easy method to decrease the brightness of a color. This creates the shade color.
The Brush tool applies this color to your object. The Paint Inside option paints brush
strokes only within a single filled area. This type of surface shading produces a hard-
edged look. There is another technique that uses gradient fills to create soft shading.
Let's take a look at how gradients help reproduce the illusion of depth.
Exercise 2.3: Using Gradients
Step 1: Getting started
Open the file 2_3_Gradients.fla in the Chapter 2 folder. Here we have a sphere and
a cube on the Stage (Figure 2.31). There are visual cues in this composition that create
an illusion of depth. What are they?
The red ball is overlapping the blue cube. This interposition suggests that the ball is
closer to the viewer. The cast shadows reference a light source, and the shading on the
cube suggests a three-dimensional object. Gradients can provide this composition with
a more realistic three-dimensional look and feel.
Figure 2.31 What depth cues are in this composition?