3D Car

3D Car

This project was to build a 3D car in Macromedia Director and put it into a world. The class was given the code to build the landscape from two bitmap files: the “mini map” in the top left was applied to the ground, and another grayscale image provided topographical information - darker shades denoted higher areas, and lighter shades lower. This information is also used to place the car at the proper height so that it appears to be on the ground.

The first part of the project was simply to design a car, so the model is a lot more complicated than it looks from the finished project. Each vertex in the model had to be plotted in the code, so I built a quick web form with a PHP backend to take a list of vertices and generate the Lingo for Director. For most of the car, I sketched the design on graph paper to come up with some reasonable numbers for the vertices. The tires and other curved surfaces, such as the windshield, proved more difficult. I wrote a few functions in PHP to use basic trigonometry to generate vertices that could be used by the first script to give me usable Lingo code.