3d Globe rotation with 'addressable' countries... Where to start?
Setup:
Been doing Flash/AS since pre-MX days
Very good .NET developer
Desired:
- A flash animation (movie) that has the countries comprising the Earth as separate movies, each 'on' a sphere that rotates-resembling the countries on the Earth in their arrangement.
- By internal or external means (It will be put into/onto a winform when done), 'address' each country movie in the whole so as to change it's appearance. Red, transparent, 'play()', etc...
Purpose:
- To create a user interface, well.. display, that the user will use by seeing that different countries change color and other attributes, signaling some kind of status.
- So as the 'world' is turning, individual countries are turning different colors. The actual control of which is seemingly elementary compared to the problem of how to render the movies (countries) in a way to resemble a 3d environment.
- As vector, it can be zoomed into/enlarged with no loss of 'fidelity'.
I'm just looking for ideas, not someone to do this for me. Feel free, but I can't pay [much!]. I don't want to go down the road of capturing/rendering 360 images of every one of 200+ countries, then manually making a movie... That sounds frighteningly tedious and inelegant.
I had a tool years back for flash that allowed you to render in 3d, then output as a movie element, but who knows what is available today.
I guess I'm asking "If someone had this requirement of you today, what do you think your approach/tools might be?"
TIA!
pat
:)
P.S. If someone really wants to tackle this, please contact me to discuss terms. But MOD: this is not a solicitation for work. I really would like to know how we'd approach such a problem.
