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Using Amapi 3D to Create 3D  in Flash  Animations

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Amapi 3D can easily  be used to create content for your 3D Flash animations.  If you're a webmaster making 3D presentations and publishing them into Flash, QuicktimeVR, Shockwave, animated Gifs, and of course ZAP & 3Space for full 3D with live particles, smoke effects, collision, forces, gravity, wind (physics engine) even after it's in your browser!  Check these examples (PC+IE5)

• Illustrator export - Amapi projects the 3D scene into 2D and saves as .ai file. Also has hidden line mode.  Also supports 2D projected into .dxf and EPSF (Printer) exports.
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• HPGL export - some Flash authoring tools (such as Freehand) can import HPGL files.
  

Gary Phillips (friendlyspider.com) notes: When you call up the Illustrator export menu in Amapi,  you can select color and scaling.  Color will fill the objectwith whatever shader color was applied to the object.  Scaling tries to fill each polygon with a slightly different shade of the color relative to its self shadowing giving  the illustrator shape a sense of lighting.  You may want to use  both settings.  When I bring the object into Illustrator 7, the first thing I do is to select all, then I go to the top menus and select Object/Pathfinder/Trim. This will delete all the hidden lines.  I then apply a color to the stroke, usually black. I like the faceted look with the pseudo gradient shading. If you lose the stroke, you also lose your outer outlining.  The other way to make Flash, and  easier also, (though it is not as precise and doesn't have  that polygon look), is to use the styles (cartoon) renderer and then  use Adobe Streamline or Flash itself to convert the bitmaps into Flash. Segmation (Xaos tools plugin for Photoshop Windows) also does a great job of turning bitmaps into vector.

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• Cartoon rendering styles - Amapi can render raytraced photorealistic and cartoon styles, with or without shades (2, 4, or soft/saturated modes). Rendering into a Quicktime animation file (MAC) or AVI (PC) or even a sequence of individual image files (JPEG, PICT, TIFF, BMP...) produces files which can compress very highly because there's potentially just a few colors (fill, edge and background colors). You can then also use various popular imaging tools to perform edge detection on such images and convert to vectorized formats suitable for Flash authoring tools.
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• Morph Targets can  be created with Amapi and saved as individual 3D files. There are several popular tools which read such 3D morph targets, then render and edge-detect / vectorize them into Flash. Amapi is a perfect tool to create such morph targets in 3D files (.3ds, .dxf, and many more formats).




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Samples
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Below  are a few examples of Flash content created in part with the help of Amapi: