Product Description

Director's Third Dimension has been designed with the Director developer with little or no 3D experience in mind. The purpose is threefold: To explain the fundamental concepts necessary to begin working with 3D; To demonstrate how these concepts manifest themselves in Director; To demonstrate strategies for the application of these concepts in terms of specific projects, including building charts, creating interfaces, and controlling characters in a 3D environment.

The book has and abundance of demos (more than 140). At the end of every chapter, there is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions and supplemental resources that will help the reader expand their learning.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #404784 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 915 pages

From the Back Cover

Director's Third Dimension has been designed with the Director developer with little or no 3D experience in mind. The purpose is threefold: To explain the fundamental concepts necessary to begin working with 3D; To demonstrate how these concepts manifest themselves in Director; To demonstrate strategies for the application of these concepts in terms of specific projects, including building charts, creating interfaces, and controlling characters in a 3D environment.

The book has and abundance of demos (more than 140). At the end of every chapter, there is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions and supplemental resources that will help the reader expand their learning.

About the Author

Paul Catanese is an experimental animator and interactive media artist residing in Chicago, Illinois. Paul has been working with interactive multimedia for over eight years. During that time he has used Director as well as many other interactive authoring solutions, including Hypercard, Oracle Media Objects, mTropolis, and Visual Basic. He has also worked with VRML, Java3D, and OpenGL. In addition, Paul has extensive experience with 3D modeling and animation, primarily with various versions of 3D Studio, AutoCAD, and LightScape.

Paul received his MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he now teaches digital animation and experimental imaging. Paul teaches methods that blend 3D, stop-motion, and traditional animation with experimental techniques that he uses in his own work. He also teaches how to create electronic input and output devices for building custom interfaces with computers. Paul is currently developing a class for SAIC to focus on the creation of physical objects that control or are controlled by virtual counterparts by combining the topics of 3D scanning, custom electronics, and Director 3D. In addition to his work at SAIC, Paul recently received a Technology Fellowship from Columbia College to develop a curriculum for a multipart class teaching 3D programming.

His animation has been screened internationally, notably at Animac99 in Barcelona, the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Enter Multimediale in Prague, and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, Washington. Currently, his animations are distributed through Blackchair productions in Seattle as well as Offline Networks in Ithaca, New York. Other credits include consulting on various commercial projects, such as the Director 7 and 8 certification tests at Brainbench.com, onsite and offsite Director training for three years at Mac University, and the creation of the interactive multimedia consulting company skeletonmoon.com.

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive guide to the basics of Director 3D
This book provides a very comprehensive guide to using the new 3D Lingo commands in Director 3D. It isn't just a re-hash of the manual (as many books like this are) - which is lucky, since the Macromedia manuals skirt over a lot of the detail and control available. The author seems to know his onions (I have seen his posts on some Director mailing lists) and explains complex concepts as well as can be expected (even if they do take a few readings)

It provides hints on optimising and best practice, in a very easy to read and approachable way, although this is not for Director beginners - you do need intermediate knowledge of Lingo and constructing Director projects.

Most of the book concentrates on generating 3D environments and interfaces directly from Lingo, rather than imported models. It also covers lighting, particles, sound, imaging Lingo, and interaction with 3D environments.

The CD has lots of good examples, as well as tools for trying parameters such as lighting, particles, textures, etc, which can aid you in your own scripting.

There are some error in the scripting, and in the diagrams (some of the diagrams explaining vectors appear to be printed sideways!) which doesn't really help you to learn from them, but these problems are far outweighed by this book's good points.

Comprehensive Treatment of Shockwave 3d
This book is comprehensive overview of Shockwave 3D. It concentrates solely on the New 3D API ad gives a good grounding in the Maths required to program the 3D API to a high level using lingo.

It assumes an Intermediate level of Director Knowledge,but treats the maths issues in easy stages.

A thoughtful and well written book. It may be a little too deep for the complete beginner, but it is a must for any professional lingo programmer,as it deals in depth with some of the issues the manuals only skim over.

Know where you are now, know where you want to be...
I have only recently become involved with "Director" with which I had no previous experience. I am experienced with Studio Max and 2D graphics programmes, generally and needed to use the inter-activity potential of Director using 3D models and specifically, the "Havok Engine". I bought a copy of Director MX and the most excellent book by Phil Gross, "MX from the source...", which I would recommend to 'newbies' to Director, good value.

The next move was 3D in Director MX and so far, any comprehensive, instructional resources seem non-existant. This book is centered around Director 8.5 rather than MX and one could expect a few differences here and there but, it was the only game in town.

Is it any good ? My reaction, with some qualifications below, is that it is an excellent piece of work, this guy really knows his stuff. The book provides on the CD, not just many demonstrations allied to the text but also, a very interesting range of software tools that you can capture and modify as you wish to meet your own needs, providing you have done some basic Lingo already. It is a book that I will keep by me for some time to come because he explains not just the principles but also, provides a lot of code that you can work with.

However there are two things that this is not. It is not for 'newbies' or for people who want a book that they can do a "quick dip" into to solve a problem on a current project. What it is, is the whole range of concepts concerning 3D on the web, primarily and, coding objects/models using Lingo rather than using pre-created 3D models from packages such as Studio Max. It does cover externally created 3D models and how to use them , very well but, that is not it's main focus and probably, it is only by reading it all, you may understand why.

If you want to understand what it is all about and are prepared to roll your sleeves up and experiment, you will have lots of fun, the concepts and examples here are much bigger than the 900+ pages of this book. But if all you are after is a "quick fix" or not that motivated to put the effort in, this is probably not the one for you, wait until someone does a "Learn it in X Hours/Days..." type book.