Project:
A Flash / 3d interace for a landing page for GEN-Y
Concept:
Since policy dictates that we cannot use people in our designs, icons were chosen representing the areas for pages of this financial planning informational tool for GEN-Yers. For example, a backpack represents "paying for school", and a set of car keys represents "buy a car". Placed in a 3d environment, these objects would become the interactive clickthrough to each categorie.
Design Challenge:
Creating an immersive interface to engage the tech/web saavy Gen-Yer.
Technical Challenge:
Finding the best way to present 3d content via flash that loads quickly and retains image quality. Provide and alternate straight html version for accessiblilty and low- bandwith environments.


The two links above show the two final solutions. Both use Autodesk 3ds Max to animate and render the 3d scene. (The main room and most 3d images were purchased from TurboSquid and edited and manipulated as needed)

The first uses jpeg sequences rendered from 3dS Max which are imported as frames into the Flash timeline. Action Script 3.0 is used to allow the buttons to control movement within the scene. Careful tweaking of file format, size and render setting allowed me to bring this master file from 30 MB down to 7 MB. With a preloader, the load-time is only acceptable within high-speed connections.

The second solves the issue of load-speed without completely compromising image quality by using jpeg sequences for only the rollover portion of the animation. For the more lenghthy zoom-in animations, I encoded the animation sequences as .flv files and load them directly into the main timeline, onclick, using either a netsteam request or the flv component. upon click of a given button. This requires that supporting files(.flvs) be uploaded to server, but each .flv file is only about 180KB itself.