Dear Dreamers!

I have seen lately an interesting thread about Flash and 3D rendering. I can add a few comments.

As you know Flash is essentially a 2D vector technology. It can also handle bitmaps and now streamed video with Flash MX. But the beauty of Flash is based on fact that it renders 2D polygons in real time.

This provides two main advantages: - Files are extremely smalls (they contain only a list of polygons instead of large bitmaps) - The rendered animation is independent of the size of the output.

In other words, Flash is not unlike a 3D product such as Carrara Studio. With the difference that Carrara manipulates 3D objects made of 3D polygons.

Because of this similarity, it comes to the mind that is should be easy to transform 3D scenes in 2D scenes and output the result as a Flash file.

Sadly, it is the reverse! This is an extremely complex process to transform any kind of 3D scene in a 2D scene.

A simple cube is easy to transform in 2D. If you add a second cube intersecting the first cube, it already becomes rather complex. Now imagine what happens with a typical Carrara Studio scene with tens of objects and
thousands of polygons.

We are anyway looking to add Flash vector rendering to Carrara Studio 2 in the future (as a plug-in).

I will keep you updated.

Happy rendering to all!

Antoine Clappier President & CEO