Rotate Object in 3D Space with PTE

[Lin Evans]

Just had a chuckle when reading something one of the competitor's users was trying to figure out from a little Youtube show they had seen. It was something which seems not possible to do with their software but is easily accomplished with PTE so I made a tiny little sample showing rotation of an object in 3D space with perspective distortion and rotation along XY AND Z axis - nothing special....

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/dimensions.zip

Lin

[Kalain]

Hi,

Just had a chuckle when reading something one of the competitor's users was trying to figure out from a little Youtube show they had seen. It was something which seems not possible to do with their software but is easily accomplished with PTE so I made a tiny little sample showing rotation of an object in 3D space with perspective distortion and rotation along XY AND Z axis - nothing special....

Lin

That's quite an impressive result.

"easily accomplished with PTE" ? !

Nothing special ? !

Well, I didn't find how to do similar example and how you did this astonish tiny little sample.

Could tell me (us) more about this ?

Best regards

Alain

[Lin Evans]

Hi Alain,

Yes, the effect is done by using the parent/child/grandchild relationship using two rectangles and the object to be manipulated so that rectangle one is the parent, rectangle two the child and the object to be manipulated on the XY and Z axis the grandchild. After setting up the relationship and creating the animations, the two rectangles are made invisible by setting their opacity to zero.

A while back one of our forum members wanted to create an effect where he had a helicopter flying across the screen. The problem was how to make the rotor blade rotate in a horizontal fashion. It was easy enough to separate the main rotor blade as a separate png object in Photoshop thus having the helicopter body and tail rotor as separate png files, but the issue was how to make the main rotor blade rotate horizontally rather than vertically.

Jean-Pierre (JPD) devised a very interesting and useful way by taking advantage of the fact that PTE allows parent/child/grandchild relationships. By rotating the child rectangle about 52 degrees inside the parent rectangle, then by using the available independent XY axis (change zoom independently) it became possible to not only distort the perspective of the main rotor blade so that it appeared to lie on a horizontal plane, but also when rotated using the regular object rotation feature, the rotation as a child of the "child" rectangle, maintained the perspective distortion thus allowing horizontal rotation.

This was not easy to explain in words, and JPD is a French native speaker, so I made a little AV Flash Tutorial on how it was accomplished (link below). The brief tutorial is in Flash 8 SWF format. If you don't have a Flash 8 player you can use the latest version of IrfanView which can play it. It's in a zipped format so you can download and play the tutorial on your own computer. It's in English - possibly somone who speaks other languages could translate. It demonstrates the use of this principle which I also used to do the little demonstration with the ship image. If you follow the tutorial, it will be easy to see how I used the same principle for the ship.

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/rotorblade.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Hi,

That's quite an impressive result.

"easily accomplished with PTE" ? !

Nothing special ? !

Well, I didn't find how to do similar example and how you did this astonish tiny little sample.

Could tell me (us) more about this ?

Best regards

Alain

[Kalain]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply and specialy for rotorblade file.

This quite an interesting 3D efect.

Alain

[georgehomer]

Hi Alain,

Yes, the effect is done by using the parent/child/grandchild relationship using two rectangles and the object to be manipulated so that rectangle one is the parent, rectangle two the child and the object to be manipulated on the XY and Z axis the grandchild. After setting up the relationship and creating the animations, the two rectangles are made invisible by setting their opacity to zero.

A while back one of our forum members wanted to create an effect where he had a helicopter flying across the screen. The problem was how to make the rotor blade rotate in a horizontal fashion. It was easy enough to separate the main rotor blade as a separate png object in Photoshop thus having the helicopter body and tail rotor as separate png files, but the issue was how to make the main rotor blade rotate horizontally rather than vertically.

Jean-Pierre (JPD) devised a very interesting and useful way by taking advantage of the fact that PTE allows parent/child/grandchild relationships. By rotating the child rectangle about 52 degrees inside the parent rectangle, then by using the available independent XY axis (change zoom independently) it became possible to not only distort the perspective of the main rotor blade so that it appeared to lie on a horizontal plane, but also when rotated using the regular object rotation feature, the rotation as a child of the "child" rectangle, maintained the perspective distortion thus allowing horizontal rotation.

This was not easy to explain in words, and JPD is a French native speaker, so I made a little AV Flash Tutorial on how it was accomplished (link below). The brief tutorial is in Flash 8 SWF format. If you don't have a Flash 8 player you can use the latest version of IrfanView which can play it. It's in a zipped format so you can download and play the tutorial on your own computer. It's in English - possibly somone who speaks other languages could translate. It demonstrates the use of this principle which I also used to do the little demonstration with the ship image. If you follow the tutorial, it will be easy to see how I used the same principle for the ship.

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/rotorblade.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

Am very interested in this tutorial and have downloaded same. Problem is when I open up the Flash Movie I get sound but no images. Advice please.

Best regards

[Ken Cox]

try opening it with

irfanview

or

Swiff Player

http://www.globfx.com/products/swfplayer/

ken

[Kalain]

Hi,

Hi Lin,

Am very interested in this tutorial and have downloaded same. Problem is when I open up the Flash Movie I get sound but no images. Advice please.

Best regards

I got exactly the same problem even with Irfanview player which was advised in other topic in the forum about swf file.

In my computer swf file was openned by Flash player 7.0r14. This was a stand alone flash player from Macromedia. Any uninstaled Falsh Player software from Adobe wasn't successful. Flash player 7.0r14 was (is) still there.

So install Flash player plugin and/or Active X 9.0.45.

Change also swf properties file : swf files should be openned with IE.

This should work.

Alain

[georgehomer]

try opening it with

irfanview

or

Swiff Player

http://www.globfx.com/products/swfplayer/

ken

Thanks Ken. Downloaded Swiff Player, works straight away.

[Lin Evans]

I see the difficulty in reading the swf file has been corrected - thanks Ken!

For anyone else having problems, though it would be a good idea to get the necessary files and players to enable reading a Flash 8 (will soon become the standard for now) file, I will post a link to an AVI of the same little tutorial here:

http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/rotorbladeavi.zip

Also, you may want to see how this type effect was used with another helicopter sample. I used separate PNG's for the tail rotor and main rotor on this example. The tail rotor is, of course, simply rotated in the conventional way but the main rotor blade was made to rotate in the horizontal fashion as described in the little tutorial above. The effect of the central support rotation was achieved by holding the Y axis steady and manipulating the X axis via the zoom in a pulsating manner with multiple keypoints.

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/helicopter.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks Ken. Downloaded Swiff Player, works straight away.