Up until today, I haven’t had much time to play with Flash CS4′s new 3d capabilities except some basic code examples. Today, I played around in the IDE and was trying to work with the 3d tools.

I have to admit I’m a bit puzzled about the Z axis in Flash CS4 and how Flash chooses to rotate an object. I was toying around with some animations just visually and then tried to set up some objects there were pointing in a particular direction and was running into issues.  The Z coordinates were changing while I was rotating the object. It took a few minutes for me to figure out what was going on (I wasn’t my normal sharp self – haa haa). The 3d rotation tool was always picking the center of my object to rotate around, instead of the registration point.  I guess I never noticed that its that same way for 2d transforms as well.  Of course, my limited experiments using just code of course using rotationY, rotationX, and rotationZ only rotate around the registration point.  I spent all these years forcing myself to work with 0,0 as a registation point because it was easier when working when working with dynamicaly sized objects and loading of assets, and it seeems if you want to play with 3d, at least in the IDE, you’re better off only using a center registration point.    It would be nice in a CS4.0.1 update if there was a way to set this as default in the system prefs.  Maybe a nice little toggle in 3d Center Point? (Hint Hint Adobe)

The other part that is just sort of an annoyance is that the 3d position and view information only shows X,Y and Z coordinates but you have to get X,Y,Z rotation from the transform panel. I know the Transform panel is where rotation has always been, but if you are going through the hassle of redoing the interface, it seems fairly logical to maybe cluster these pieces together finally.

I don’t want this to sound like I’m only complaining. I really love Flash CS4. Years ago, I dreamed of an After Effects timeline in Flash. Seems like only yesterday that I was dreaming of what Flash CS4 was to become (Dec 2005: Return of LiveMotion). Just need that motion vector Blur and I’ll be 3 for 3.