Macromedia's Director Shockwave Studio is the Swiss army knife of multimedia development tools. Its native programming environment, Lingo, supports 2D shapes and animation, streaming audio, bitmap and vector images, video, Flash animations, and interactive programming. Version 8.5 adds the ability to deliver 3D content and streamed RealAudio and RealVideo. No other package on the market can claim this breadth of support, and it's not for a lack of effort. A graveyard of unsuccessful has-beens includes Ligos's V-Realm Worldbuilder, Sense8's WorldToolKit, VRCreator Interactive Toolset, and ParaGraph's Virtual Home Space Builder, to name just a few.
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Basic primitive shapes (boxes, spheres) are built into Director 8.5's 3D engine. You can drag and drop behaviours such as "Create Sphere" or create shapes using Lingo commands. Other canned behaviours permit actions such as rotating and dragging an object, or camera-doll. Beyond these basic actions, however, one must delve deeply into a catalogue that contains more than 340 new 3D Lingo commands -- only experienced Lingo programmers need apply.
We think that you would agree that a world of boxes and spheres is pretty boring. To spice things up, Macromedia teamed with 40 or so 3D-authoring tool manufacturers to create tools to export their products to Director's new W3D format. These tools allow artists to create sophisticated animated geometry in their favourite authoring program, then import it into Director. Discreet has an exporter for 3D Studio Max 3.1 and 4.0, Alias Wavefront's Maya update was released in April, and NewTek is very close to shipping one for LightWave.
We reviewed the 3D Studio Max export utilities and found them to be remarkably stable. However, several cool new features such as flex and skin modifiers, bump maps, and animated textures are not supported. Bones animation is supported, but we recommend using the Character Studio plug-in, since Biped and Physique are fully compatible, including motion-captured keyframe animation.
The most compelling feature was the ability to selectively export geometry and animation data separately. Prior to this development, each animation sequence needed to be rendered in a bulky bitmap format. The software now gives you the choice to export animation geometry for download separately then export its movements in smaller files. The separate movement files are then stitched together on the end user's machine, using Lingo that's built into the Shockwave player -- this feature cuts download time drastically.
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