A Live-action Movie

This chapter is about taking your character model and animating him or her for use in an interactive 3D world. Its main use is for computer games, but it could equally be used for a character on a website that is interactive and responds to the user's actions. Where this differs from the earlier chapters is that we will be creating it for use in Shockwave 3D. Macromedia Director's Shockwave 3D allows the creation of virtual worlds and all the interaction and motion, which is implicated by that. Director has had 3D capabilities for a few years, but it is only recently proving to be popular. The main issue is that not enough developers know how to harness its power. This chapter will get you well under way, and the following two chapters will put you in a strong position to create your own real time 3D interactive content and games.

First of all we will animate our character, and then we will import him into Director applying pre-written behaviors that will allow you to control him in a simple world. In a sense, you will be creating a live-action movie, where you are the camera operator and Director of the action.

Biped

The simplest way to deform a single mesh character built-in 3D Studio Max is by using 'Biped' in the Character Studio Plug-in. Biped is a sophisticated animation controller that gives us a ready made bone structure. We can fit a Biped...