I’ve recently been learning a few new programs, particularly Cinema 4D and Swift 3D, in tandem with Apple Motion and Adobe After Effects CS4. I was already a pretty crafty dude with After Effects, but I had never even tapped into a fraction of what it was capable of since there is a bit of a learning curve there.

The thought came to me today as to why I have spent so much time on 3D with ActionScript when doing 3D with these tools is so much easier? My next thought was of course, the obvious answer…These 3D movies I’m making using far superior tools (for 3D design) are static in nature. These movies are quite cool to watch and fun to make, but they lack the 2 things that make ActionScript 3D so intriguing: 1) user interactivity (the thing that makes games so addicting for the “gamer” community), and 2) the ability to make the content dynamically driven by data on a server hundreds or thousands of miles away.

There are a few “blocking points” though that we developers who consider ourselves “the bleeding edge of RIA” still need to address. First, although Flash 10 has undergone substantial improvement for 3D rendering, the code required to produce 3D user interfaces is still complicated and buggy, and it is still not true 3D. The vector-based image sequences deliver the illusion of 3D through the use of carefully placed masks, shadows, gradients, and the relational sizing of objects. This is an incredibly resource intensive process from a hardware standpoint. There is a reason that almost all PC games are still developed using C++, which is the fact that the language gives you direct access to the computer’s hardware and allows the application to make decisions in the way that the interface is displayed based on the hardware resources that are available to it.

By its very nature, the Flash VM is resource-intensive to begin with for the simple fact that it is a virtual machine (the advantage being portability between platforms). This should sound quite familiar to Java enterprise developers, who also sacrifice resources for the advantage of portability. In the enterprise, the answer is always simply “throw more hardware at it” if things start slowing down. In the consumer market however, we face a different predicament developing mainstream 3D interfaces in – say – Adobe AIR. The answer there is not as simple as throwing more hardware at it because A) few consumers know what to get or how to install it, B) computer and hardware vendors purposely limit the upgrade path of computers in the consumer market, and C) this is a terrible idea to begin with and the wrong way to look things. The answer should instead be a matter of making companies like Adobe find ways to make their software more efficient… For example, change the properties of AIR to compile like C++ does instead of the Flash VM. Unfortunately, this is not cost-effective for Adobe or even logical for them at this point, which puts the problem back in the developer’s hands, especially for framework creators like the PaperVision 3D team.

…just food for thought.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Flash Camp Phoenix a Huge Success
• Best Drunk on Software Episode Ever
• Enterprise Flex and the Swiz Framework Architecture, Part 3: Using Autowire and Mediate
• “Flex 4 in Action” (Early Access Edition) Now Available!
• Designing (RED)Wire, Part 3: Advanced Styling Methods for Enhanced User Experience with Adobe Flex and AIR

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Posted by Dan Orlando on January 31st, 2009 :: Filed under General, User Experience
Tags :: 3D, Actionscript, Actionscript 3D, Flash
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