by Andrea Fasce
Using the new anfy3d 1.2 wizard is really simple.. This tutorial will guide you through every step of the tutorial....
When refering to texture or images we are talking about .gif or .jpg images.
Consider that you won't be able to access all dialogs when you run the wizard through anfyedit.
There are 3 different menus:
Inside the "a3d scene file" you can specify the .a3d file you want to edit. Please note that if you've modified an .a3d file you've already loaded, you have to push the "reload" button.
If you want to modify an a3d project that already exists, you can push the "load html" button and a dialog will let you choose which html to load. Then every setting that's present in the html file will directly be inserted into the wizard settings.
The "Install 3ds max plugin" button will install anfy3d 3dsmax plugins directly into the plugins directory of 3dsmax. If something doesn't work, just install the plugins by hand. It's really simple; just copy the files anfy3d1x.dle (for 3dsmax v 1.x) or anfy3d2x.dle (for version 2.x) that you can find into the directory "plugins" inside the main anfy3d directory directly to the plugins directory of your 3dsmax installation.
When you have selected a scene or loaded an html file you can press the "Next" button.
Note: when loading an .a3d scene, the wizard will try to load every texture required by the scene from the same directory from where you are loading the scene file. If a texture is not found, a file requester will pop up asking you to select a .gif or .jpg image to load. If you want you can push the cancel button, and the material associated to that texture won't be textured.
As you can see from this point there's a new Button in the bottom part of the wizard. It's the 'Preview' button, which let you directly test your applet in realtime just when you're changing the parameters.
In the rest of the dialog there are 3 main groups of datas:
This dialog is useful to change various aspects of the applet.
Applet aspect
This is used to change the "Width" and "Height" of the applet, and the type of optional background. Applet could have no background, a color background or an image background.
Far Clipping
This is useful when you're dealing with very large scenes. The 3d engine will stop drawing objects that are far form the observer; you can decide how far.
Fog
Rather than using a far clipping, you may decide to use fog for distant objects. This way they'll disappear gradually... Fog far is something like the far clipping: nothing will be visible after the 'fog far' distance from the observer. Fog near tell the engine where to start to draw the fog.
Scene parameters
These parameters are really useful and are used to change important aspects of the scene.
This dialog is very useful to select different ways of interaction with the user.
Animation type
You can switch between different ways of animating your scene using the "animation mode" list:
With the mousestop button you will be able to decide if the animation should stop when the mouse enters anfy3d applet area.
Interaction
Interaction can assume the values off, on or label.
When interaction is on or is label, you'll be able to select the object on the screen, and if there's a link for an object (see Step1), a page will be opened. If you select 'label', a label will appear if an object has a label (see Step1) and you can change the style of the label.
Target frame
This is used to to decide where to open new pages if interaction is active. So you can use frames as you want.
Additional author/credits
This is used to save additional datas directly inside your .a3d scene, containing copyrights messages or other informations.
This dialog is useful to improve the applet speed, but pay attention.. Usually it's useful to use the optimize for compatibility button...
From this dialog you can also change the browser status bar message (the message that will be shown in the bottom browser message bar when the mouse is over anfy3d screen) and the message that will appear on browsers that doesn't support java.
With this dialog you can shareware register anfy3d for the domain you decided. Consider that if you don't register you won't be able to use the link options and if you press the mouse button into the anfy3d screen a LinkWare window will appear. Anyway you can show scenes without the need of registering.
Please note that if you register you can insert a link (reglink) and if you are not using an interactive mode (see Step 3) when someone clicks on the applet it'll link there.
With this dialog you'll be able to save all your work inside a directory.
The HTML code window shows the html code that you'll need to show Anfy3D in you page; you can copy that code directly into the clipboard so you can parte it inside your preferred html editor
copy all files to will ask you the name of an html file and then generate in such directory all the files required to show the applet. All the datas MUST be in the same directory
Set as active Desktop will set the current Anfy3D scene as an active desktop item. This means that you can create your own "3d channel bar" with your preferred links or anything you want.
Save as screensaver will save the current scene as the default screensaver. By default the screensaver will activate after 4 minutes of inactivity. Please note that on win95/98 the screensaver is the default screensaver for all the machine, on winNT the screensaver is the default screensaver for the user which installed it (that must have acces to the SYSTEM32 directory !)
Finishcan only be used if you're editing a scene with anfyedit. It'll save everything into a directory and will tell anfyedit where to load the files when uploading to the FTP.