The choice is Sandy

In my last post I said I would implement an open source 3D engine for flash. I decided to go through with this and chose to make use of Sandy 3D which like all other 3D Flash engines, uses Actionscript 1, 2 and 3 and can be accessed here www.flashsandy.org. You set it up with Flash in the same way you set up Wiiflash, just make sure you select the folder that holds the src folder and not the src folder itself.

I chose Sandy because they had a dedicated site with well structured tutorials on.  Through playing around and completing some of the tutorials on Sandy my fears of lack of animation and interaction in comparison to Flash were confirmed, prompting me to change the concept of the game to something else I already had in mind. Instead of someone swinging about you now had to glide a plane through the city to avoiding buildings as the plane approached them (see sketches below). Each time you past a certain section of buildings the plane would speed up and keep doing so until it crashed. The user would still make use of Wii controls through spreading arms out and forming a wingspan whilst holding the Wiimotes in either hand whilst in turn the user would also sway from side to side.

From this I also produced an airplane in Maya and eventually imported the model into Sandy via 3ds max (please see images below) via a 3ds max plug-in for Sandy called AS3 Geom Class Exporter which can be found here http://seraf.mediabox.fr/showcase/as3-geom-class-exporter-for-3ds-max-english/. Now time to do some further development and get deeper into the waters.

Now the game revolves around an airplane flying through a Cityscape avoiding buildings

The game will require avoiding City buildings as the airplane flies through

Swaying hands up and down(not in a bird motion) so that whilst one hand is up the other is down will glide the plan around.

3D model of the plane made in Maya

Airplane after imported into Sandy

3D Model Test

I developed a 3D model of a building (see images below) in Maya however I had to import it into 3ds max so I could export it as an dxf file (synonymous with AutoCAD) to import into Swift 3D. Once in Swift 3D I exported the model as a swf file to bring into Flash. The process of going from one package to another was quite frustrating, I don’t see why all these 3D software’s can’t export into other popular formats such as dxf or why can't Swift 3D be able to accept popular universal 3D files like fbx or obj.  

What was even more frustrating however was that once the model was in flash it was no longer a model, it turned into a 2D image. Because of this I decided to do away with the idea of producing the game in Flash CS4 solely unless I make all the models in Flash which I think would prove too tricky and intricate. The only alternative there is, is to make use of a 3D engine for Flash, though this way I foresee less freedom to animate and more programming into a software that is new for me. It’s probably will be wise to tone down the intricate elements of the game which involve a lot of animation such as the swinging element which I intended to implement through keyframe animation and inverse kinematics within Flash CS4. It all depends on how the 3D engine works.

I’ll keep you posted

 Model of Cityscape in Maya

Model of cityscape when brought into Flash via Swift 3D

As you can see from the picture immediately below every thing looked fine. However when you rotate the model outward you can see from the next picture below that it has no depth.