What's a Tentacle?
Flash Dev
tent1
 As part of my first adventure into character model animation in Away3D, I decided to start nice and simply. I have recently started replaying one of my all time favourite old school point-and-click adventure games, Day of the Tentacle!

For those of you who have played and enjoyed the game as much as I have, you will know that the characters in the game are hugely funny and entertaining in their own right. My favourite character of course has to be Purple Tentacle. The title character of the game and also criminal mastermind Purple Tentacle turns evil after drinking contaminated water from a river downstream of a toxic waste outlet. Aside from becoming smarter and more aggressive, Purple Tentacle sprouts two stubby little arms that act as his tools for world domination!

If you have not played this great game, I suggest you hop over to google and find yourself a copy, you will not be disappointed!

Alright, back to the issue at hand. My first character animation in Away3D. As you can see, purple tentacle is a very simple character shaped like... you guessed it... a tentacle! Other than keeping the model simple, I decided to keep the animation simple as well. It is always wise to keep it simple at first when experimenting with new technologies so that you can have a base when comparing more complex models and animations in terms of performance.

The Model :


Modelled in 3DSMax from a basic cone primitve, I added the two mutated arms, round out the shape a bit and added a small suction cup at the bottom.

tent3d

The Texture :


The same process as in previous posts was used but I did add one step. Once the texture was created and applied in 3DSMax, a light was added to the scene and shadows were applid to the model. Once that was done the texture was rendered out with the lighting and shadows "baked" in to the texture itself. Here is the result, a skin with built in shadows and highlights.


tentmat


The animation :


Now this was the whole point of this experiment. A simple side to side swaying animation was created and added to the model in 3DSMax. This 20 frame looping animation was then exported to the MD2 model format and the frames stitched together to form a single animation sequence. The MD2 animation type is a frame by frame animation consisting of one model with slightly different vertex placement on each frame. Each frame's vertex information is stored and changed when each frame is rendered. When played one after the other, animation is created.



Conclusion :


The next step from here is creating a more complex animation, like a walk, which will be added to a more complex character model. This experiment was a proof of concept and from creating our evil tentacle I have learned a great deal about mesh animations for 3D in Flash.

As a designer I couldn't resist creating a DOTT'esque background to go with our tentacle and fans of the game will also recognise the little jingle that plays on roll-over of the SWF window.
 

Comments 

 
#2 2011-10-16 10:50
Hey, Great post. St. augustine school of medical assistants: ieee.ece.jhu.edu/.../...
Also, pertaining to this is many great forums. saved.
Quote
 
 
#1 2011-02-01 09:49
Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is a really well written article. I’ll make sure to bookmark it and return to read more of your useful info. Thanks for the post. I will certainly comeback.
Quote
 

Add comment