Flash 3D Advertising Example
Flash 3D Educational Example
Is Flash 3D an Oxymoron?
At a high level, you can't really do real-time 3D within Flash. It is possible to include 3D graphics in Flash, but these graphics will most often be pre-rendered still images as opposed to true real-time three graphics. In other words, each frame that you see has been rendered in advance, as opposed to being rendered in real-time, frame-by-frame. While highly realistic real-time 3D is not an option for Flash, real-time 3D graphics are available at a certain level. For example a more a symbolic or representational approach is possible. Texture mapping, which is the application of images onto the surfaces of 3D models, is not something that is strongly supported within Flash, but some applications don't require this level of realism. The upside of this type of application is that there is very broad adoption of the Flash plug-in and just about everyone has it. Flash 3D is definitely the web-based approach of choice when you need your content to be viewable by nearly everyone.
What does the future hold for Flash 3D? Flash 3D seems to be following the path that its sister-product, Director, did. It's starting off with a very code-intensive polygon-by-polygon representational approach. It's difficult to predict, but with the large amounts of investment being made by Adobe/Macromedia into their flagship product, it wouldn't be surprising to see true real-time 3D graphics being built into Flash. If it does follow the same path that Director did, its next step would be to support more realistic 3D graphics. For example it would be able to represent individual 3D models for product views and animations that could be rotated, panned, zoomed, etc. Down the road, we could then expect more advanced support, for example support of fully animated characters and figures within the 3D engine. Finally, we might see a future implementation of Flash 3D support the very latest features supported by modern graphics cards, for example bump-mapping, vertex shaders, etc.
There are a number of options to convert content from 3D modeling applications into Flash. For example there are plug-ins for 3D Studio Max (Illustrate, Swift 3D, etc) for this purpose. These components, which work in conjunction with a 3D modeling application (Max, Maya, etc), allow you to the export content into the SWF Flash format. In this process, 3D files are converted into pre-rendered drawings and illustrations. For example you can take an animation and export it out into pre-rendered frames in a vector format to bring into Flash in order to simulate the look 3D. An important point here is that some companies have a large supply of existing CAD assets. If you need illustrations of these assets, exporting data for Flash 3D can be efficient way to generate those illustrations in a format that everyone can view on the web.
Examples
