3d shadows

[zoltan]

hi, I am working on my first 3d flash project, I have a good deal of experience with Flash and 3d as well. I am working with 3dstudio max, and just got swift3d and vecta3d max. While neither program does quite as much as I had hoped, they look promising and sure beat doing it in dimensions. One thing that seems to be missing from the renderer of either is the ability to do shadows. Is this really the case, that you cannot render shadows in Swift3d? vecta3d standalone looks like it has more features than the max plugin, but I havent gotten it yet to play around with. I know I have seen flash sites with 3d shadows in them, for instance if you click on "shoot 'em up" at http://www.pepworks.com and look at the loading sequences of the game. If it is not possible in any off the shelf program, does anyone know some good techniques for faking it? I am working on a large site where we want to take some fairly complex 3d scenes and render them out for use as backgrounds in flash, then go in and make smaller individual 3d anims for objects in the scene that will be interactive.

btw, take a look at the site I have been designing - http://www.distantcorners.com - all flash, all the time.

thanks.

zoltan

[Vince]

Hmmm... well from looking at that I'd say that all those shadows were "faked".. or atleast hand drawn in... Nice 3D there at Pep works...

The easiest way I know of making shadows is to just make ANOTHER instance of the movie clip of the 3D animation and then make it black (by changing the brightness or tint or something) and then just "skewing" it to the proper angles.

What EXACTLY are you trying to do... there's always a hundred different ways of doing stuff like this.