how can i make a video/image cube interactive?

Question

im doing a project in adobe director and im looking to make an image/video cube which display an image or video on each side of the cube now i have seen some tutorial on how to make the cube in softwares like cinema 4d but how could i make this cube interactive such as adding a feature were you can drag and drop an image or a video on any side of the cube, so the cube becomes editable, im looking to make this for an application which im making in adobe director so if its possible i would need it still running and editable after i make it a .exe file.

the feature doesnt have to be drag and drop but i need to have the cube become editable to add image/video to it after its turned in to .exe file. wouldnt mind looking at other softwares to make this but would need to import it in adobe director to work.

Answer 1

This is quite doable. The biggest problem is going to be performance.

Yes, Director can handle hardware accelerated 3d and hardware accelerated video, but using a video as a texture in a sw3d sprite would almost certainly require that you using imaging lingo to grab each frame individually from a direct-to-stage (DTS) video and then use it as a texture for one of the faces. Multiply this process by six, and it will probably be a strain to update it at a decent frame rate.

Even with the optimization of updating only the maximum three faces visible at any one time. this is likely to be a bit sluggish.

You haven't mentioned if this is for browser or projector playback. Frankly I can't see this working very well in the browser. Almost certainly Flash would be a better choice. Flash also has elementary 3d capabilities, which are set to be improved in future versions. It can certainly handle a cube.

If your video is in realmedia you can get the video frames directly from the cast member I think, otherwise this will probably require using a hidden movie-in-a-window, so that you can hide the video-frame capture business. You will have to put the videos in another director movie loaded as a MIAW. The videos should have DTS set to true, and then you can use imaging lingo to crop the relevant part of the stage.image. Ugly, I know.

A cube is a very simple thing, so you shouldn't need to use a 3d editor to make it.

Take a look at this tutorial on Adobe's website which is very close to what you want. It uses realmedia, but it would not be so hard to adapt it to other video types, even flv.