Moveable Rotating Sphere

[akki007]

Hi all,

I want to make a user controllable rotating sphere. Exactly the same as the google earth initial view only I dont want to be able to zoom, just spin around using the mouse

I then want to map jigsaw shaped pieces over the sphere for users to click and take them to another page.

Any ideas or help is greatfully appreciated!!!

 

[ComputerPerson_imported]

There are a couple of ways that I know of for doing this.

The first is to either write your own 3D engine, or use one that someone else wrote. This can be very hard to do and eat up a lot of time.

The way I would suggest doing this is by using Swift3D. In case you haven't already heard of it before, it is a standalone program that allows you to create 3D flash animations fairly easily. It is a little on the expensive side ($229) but I've found that it comes in extremely handy for many things such as this. They do offer a free trial but I'm not sure if it allows exporting your animations:

http://www.erain.com/downloads/trials/

You will need to build and animate each puzzle piece going around the sphere separately. After this, import the pieces into flash. Delete all of the frames that show the puzzle piece when it is behind the sphere. Then line everything up on the timeline so it actually looks like the rotating pieces are part of a whole. Now it should be as easy as assigning the desired actions to each puzzle piece. In your case, going to a different page.

There may be an easier way to do this that I have overlooked. No matter what, this task will still be very laborious and time-consuming.