This piece was for the final piece of the first year of FD Multimedia and the project was to create a gallery with which to show your groups (we had to work in groups of 5-6 which was interesting) work. We first had the idea of creating the most obvious solution, an actual gallery, and some people threw in ideas of how this could be done. As I had some knowledge in 3d I presented the group with the idea of creating the gallery in 3d and at first this didn’t go down well with the group and some were sceptical but I was able to explain how the idea would work by creating 3d animations of the routes from each person. (there was 6 of us in the group so each person would need 5 separate 3d animations) It was going to be a lot of work on my half but I had some good people behind me with flash and I believed it could be done.

3d

The first job for me was to create the 3d piece. I had decided to use a plug-in which could export the 3d animation out as an SWF as I thought this would create a smaller file size (with it being a vector) and it would be easier to import into flash for my colleagues. The problem with this plug-in was that I was not able to use textures, only block colours and this presented a problem when creating the walls. I even eventually had to create the wall brick by brick. (Which really isn’t as hard as it sounds, creating one brick copying it and moving then new brick the length of the brick so that is exactly in line with the old brick then copying the 2 bricks and repeating the process until you have a line of bricks and repeat the process again vertically to create a wall) I had to use a similar process to create the floorboards but as the objects were only simple blocks it really didn’t add much to the polygon count of the entire scene. The plain white gallery walls and carpet were drawn out in illustrator as flat shapes and extruded while the door was a simple block with bevelled sections for the panels.

The modelling of the gallery was quite simple the tricky (and very time consuming part) was setting up the cameras and spines from each person to each other person for the cameras to run along. After that had been setup it was a matter of rendering the cameras running down each route and exporting them, unfortunately the rendering would take some time and I usually ended up with glitches in the middle of the route and would have to sort that out and re-render them. The effort was worth it I feel and gave our gallery a unique cartoony but sharp look.

Flash

This was not supposed to be part of my job in the group but it eventually turned out that the person who was creating the flash interface was having trouble importing the swf’s. They had been importing them into the actual FLA flash file and this was creating huge file sizes which would crash flash before it was able to finish exporting the main swf. I was able to step in and get the code working to import in the individual swf’s instead of having them within the fla and got the whole thing working in time. But the credit for the navigation must go to one of the other members of my group.

as said the navigation (pull out menu and the navigation on the TV screen) are not my work. the ability to open the projects by clicking the file icon has been disabled.