"3D" Movement in Macromedia Flash?

Question

Let's say you're in your bedroom. You're looking at one wall, but decide to turn to the left to look at the wall to the left. Let's say I've drawn this entire room and the visitor to my website can move left and right in terms of a first person view. If the person wanted to turn to look at the wall to the left, is there any specific means to create this sort of 3D movement or do I have to individually draw several frames from the each angle and the eye turns to the left wall (frames would be like this but with more frames in between: starting wall, a little left of starting wall, wall intersection, a little left of wall intersection, left wall) in an animation triggered by the clicking on the button to move left or right?

Answer 1

Your options are:

a) individually draw each frame of the room as it would appear from a slightly different angle, mimicking turning one's gaze

b) recreating the bedroom in a 3D modelling environment, and rendering the camera tracking the direction you want to see.

To do the latter in Flash, you need a 3D animation program like Swift3D (http://www.erain.com/ ). Swift3D also has cheaper versions that are simply "interfaces" to port 3D models from other popular animation software, like 3DS Max or Maya (used in Hollywood and TV 3D work), into Flash.

There is also some open-source Flash software, some of which supports 3D animation to greater or lesser degrees... check out http://osflash.org/projects for a complete list of the projects.