Scaling for 3D

Abstract

In case the first two chapters of this book have not drilled this into you so completely that you now have nightmares about it every night, we’re going to repeat it once again. All of the cheats in this book are about one thing: fooling the user into seeing 3D on a 2D screen. There are many different methods for achieving this. At the very high end, we have complicated 3D engines that allow the creation and traversing of 3D worlds, complete with photo-realistic lighting and textures. On the other end of the scale, there’s the kind of faux-3D that we’re talking about in this book. Since Flash doesn’t have a built-in 3D engine or the computational firepower for creating such an engine in ActionScript, we need to resort to trickery. This chapter is about using one of the most important clues that our brain processes when judging depth and perspective: the relative sizes of various objects. In other words, scale.