The Brief

The brief for this module was to consider one or a variety of professional directions within commercial web design, for example corporate identity, advertising, editorial and promotional web design, and structure a project proposal to reflect this.

The Evaluation

Overall I have mixed feelings on how the project ended. Overall I fully enjoyed working with away3d and trying to create something that would've been fairly unique as an interactive web site. The whole point of this project from my point of view was to learn how to use the away3d api to create a 3d web based interactive site using the latest technology. From a learning point of view iv'e picked up some very valuable knowledge which gives me some experience of 3d flash based sites that hopefully I can take into employment at a later date.

From a project point of view I am slightly disappointed that I couldn’t create what I set out to do at the beginning of the first semester and to not complete the project fully. It is probably a case of biting off more than I could chew but with any learning curve its difficult to create something spectacular on your first attempt especially with a new technology. In general I feel my idea was slightly flawed, the weather system is far to repetitive no matter which locations are being used and it doesn't serve a solid purpose, it may have been far more logical to let the user create there own weather system and build a planet using it. Secondly, the project ended up far to simple. When I first began to design and develop the site I had grand plans for various content and special effects.

But it has over the course of the semester being whittled down to a simple case of plant a tree or flower then use the weather system to grow and animate it. This of course Is not entirely my fault due to the fact that both flash and away3d are fairly limited in respects to 3d content as its a fairly new technology and probably wasn't built for a project of this detail and scale in mind.

The lack of support in away3d has also hindered the project specifically with working with 3d models but I feel that ive picked up some valuable skills in flash, designing for 3d, actionscript 3, 3d flash based engines and php to add to my previous knowledge and have gained some knowledge of 3d modelling to a level were id feel comfortable participating in another project such as this again.

The link to the live site can be found here

The link to the development blog can be found here