Hi,

I would like to make a moveable figure of a human in 3D. Can anyone give me suggestion how can I achieve it using Away3D 4.0 and Flash Builder 4.6?

I think that if you put a little more effort into your question, people will be more likely to be able to give you good answers.

What do you mean by “moveable”? Do you have a model already that was created in a modeling tool, or any other assets to work with? What is your experience with Away3D so far?

This will be my first project with Away3D. Moveable means that the user should be able to move a hole figure as well as for example a hand. It can be made just like in this tutorial:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/creating-games-away3d.html

I would like to use it n my asp.net project. I supose I would be able to sent data from flash into SQL database.

The tutorial that you reference only lets you move the entire object (not deform it, the way that you would have to do if you wanted to, for example, bend an arm as you move the hand.)

If you’re fine with that, just use that tutorial, but instead of loading the vase model load your own humanoid model. If you don’t have a model for the human, I think that’s probably where you should start. You (or someone you hire) will have to create the model for you, and you can then load that into Away3D and display it, move it around in the scene (using the x, y and z properties) et c.

Friend made for me such a model. It have extension .obj but he can made it like from 3dmax. Is it going to be diffiicult to insert such model into project?

No, just go ahead and load the OBJ file the same way that you’re loading the AWD file in the tutorial. Make sure the right parser is enabled (either just OBJParser, or ALL_BUNDLED.)

I’m wondering one more thing. I would like to save the position of a model in database. Is it going to be very hard to do it? Is it going to be many data to save in DB?

What do you mean by “position”? The position is just three numbers. I’m sure you won’t find it too hard to save those three numbers to the database. If you want to store rotation et c as well, then maybe storing the transformation matrix is better. Regardless, sending things to the back-end to be stored in a database is no harder with Away3D data than any other data in Flash.

Richard Olsson - 11 July 2012 09:37 AM

The tutorial that you reference only lets you move the entire object (not deform it, the way that you would have to do if you wanted to, for example, bend an arm as you move the hand.)

But You said that I will be able to bend an arm. So it suppose to be more data to save after such movement.

No, I said that if you’re fine with only moving objects, and not deforming them, you can use the exact approach described in that tutorial. If you want to be able to deform the mesh that puts a whole new category of complexity into both the model creation, the export (you can’t use OBJ for example) and the ActionScript code.

I would encourage you to start small, and not try to do such a complex thing so early. When you feel comfortable with working with the scene graph and the general basics of Away3D, have a look at some of the skeletal animation examples in the away3d-examples-fp11 repository (soon to be updated for the 4.0 release.)

Could you give me a link to this skeletal animation?

A link to what exactly? A description of what skeletal animation is? Or a link to how it can be created in different modeling/animation packages? Or an example of how to use it in Away3D?

The latter can be found in the away3d-examples-fp11 repository on GitHub. Look for the character animation example. More information about skeletal animation in general can probably most easily be found by just googling.

I suppose I should use an .md5 extantion. But can you tell me one thing. Because in all examples that I found the movement of model was set in 3d program by animation. In my projest every bone should be able to move separetly be mouse. So should it be set in 3d program to name every bone?

You should probably still create your model and rig it (create a skeleton for it) in a 3D modeling/animation tool. You could theoretically of course do everything in code, but that would be incredibly complicated and time-consuming.

Then once you have modeled and rigged your humanoid character, export it using a file format that supports skeletal animation and that Away3D supports (AWD2, MD5 or Collada) and import it into Away3D.

Once in Away3D, what you’ll want to do is create a custom skeleton animation node that modifies the skeleton pose to have one (or several) joints follow your mouse. There are some threads going about this already on the forum, so try googling or let us know when you get that far and I’ll find the threads for you.

I think I should start from making or download a model. What extantion will be the best in my case? Is there somewhere to download an awd2 example? What about the bones names? Could I find out what are thier names when I will find some awd2 example?

Have a look at this tutorial:
http://away3d.com/example/3ds_Max_workflow

If you’re using Maya instead of 3ds Max the workflow is still essentially the same. If you are using any other editor, try Collada export instead, and optionally convert to AWD2 through Prefab (next release, which should be soon.)