More on Flash 10 3D
One more problem you might run into with Flash 10 3D is when you rotate a display object in 3D. Display objects are perfect planes, which means they don’t have any thickness. The old joke, “he’s so thin that if he turns sideways you can’t see him” can be taken literally when dealing with display objects, as you can see below:
Here, I’m just drawing a bunch of circles, while slowly rotating them on the y axis. As you see, the closer you get to 90 degrees, the less you see of the circle. Actually, I’ve arranged it so it never hits exactly 90 degrees, so you can still see a few pixels of the center circle. If you rotate something exactly 90 degrees AND view it head on, you won’t see it at all.
But worse than just not seeing it is the degradation it goes through as it approaches that invisibility threshold. You can see the two circles on either side of the center one almost seem to be drawn with dotted lines.
Again, I’m not out to totally bash Flash 10. I think it’s awesome that Adobe has finally put this into Flash, and for a first release, I’m thrilled. These are just things to keep an eye out for, and hopefully things that Adobe will take a look at improving in round 2.