Director Article

Displaying a Video on the Booth Screen

The scene is made up of a booth with the car on a tray. In the background, you can see a screen. Now that the scene is set up, play a video on that screen using the following steps.

1. Select Insert > Media Element > RealMedia which creates a new RealMedia digital video cast member.
2. In the Filename field of the Member tab in the Property inspector, enter the URL to a RealMedia video (such as http://myserver.com/video/tvad.rm).

3. Give a name to the cast member. In this tutorial, I named the digital video formula1video.



Figure 15. The Real Media cast member

4. In the score window, create a second instance of the 3D scene by dragging and dropping the main W3D cast member from the internal cast. Now that you have set up the scene, you need a 3D sprite on the same channel with only the behaviors necessary for interactivity or effects.



Figure 16. The Score

5. I also want the player head to hold on a frame during the video playback. To this end, drag and drop the Hold on Current Frame behavior on the score script channel from the standard Navigation library.

   

   Figure 18. The Play RealVideo behavior

6. With the player head on the second sprite , drag and drop the Play Real Video® behavior onto the 3D scene. The parameter dialog box in figure 19 appears.

   

   Figure 19. The parameter dialog box for the Play Real Video behavior

7. For the Texture Shader parameter, select the shader (or material) on which the digital video texture will be displayed; for instance, Booth Screen.
8. For the Real Video Member parameter, select the newly created digital video cast member. For instance, formula1video.

9. Press Play in the Director toolbar or press Enter/Return. The movie starts, and the video now plays on the booth screen.

   

   Figure 20. The video playing on the booth screen

   In the Behavior pane of the Property inspector, notice that there is only one entry: the one for the Play Real Video® behavior in Figure 21.

   

   Figure 21. The Property inspector with the Play Real Video® behavior applied to the booth screen

   And Figure 22 shows the resulting internal cast.

   

   Figure 22. The final internal cast

In conclusion, the Chrome Library set of 3D behaviors takes the drudgery out of setting up your 3D scenes. Additionally, with a minimum effort on your part, you can create complex interactive scenes (cameras, triggers...), special effects (tweening, particles...), and much more...