A customer wanted to have his whole website on a cube. Choosing a section should rotate the cube to the new section. This is very similar to the fast user switch of Mac OS X. When I heard this from my boss I started screaming. This would be totally slow in Flash7 and for such a website is Flash8 too early. But for our presentation we used Flash8 (I also created a working version for Flash7 using other techniques).
The Flash8 cube transition is done like this:
- Make snapshot of current section to a BitmapData object
- Do the same with the next section
- Create a 3D cube with the current section facing the user
- Rotate the cube around y-axis to next section
- Substitute the BitmapData with a movieclip
Of course the perspective is not correct. I read a something about the transformations on this very usefull page. Just look at the cube example there and you will get the idea. I will share my code when the job is done and everything is optimized. It is also very funny to have the same effect in Flash7 and Flash8. The Flash7 version uses movieclips that are skewed instead of BitmapData. This gives Flash8 users more speed and also people with Flash7 are able to see the effect.
One Comment
Post the link please, I am dying to see it live! ;)