Carrying on with the vision of creating commercial components for Flash MX, Chuck Timmerman has released 3D Flyout components for Flash MX. Timmerman's products are a little different than other commercial components currently on the market in the sense that he aims more at designers than developers. His philosophy is unique, yet simple: "Despite the growing emphasis on Flash DEVELOPERS, I think there are a lot of DESIGNERS out there who are looking for tools ... to make special effects possible without having to program."
The review of the Timmerman's Scooter components was positive. Let's see how well 3D Flyout holds up.
What does it do?
The purpose of 3D Flyout is to give designers the ability to easily create 3D fly out effects. The product comes with several pre-made objects including hearts, flowers, stars, and dollar signs, but designers are not limited to those objects. They can import their own objects to add some 3D fly out effects to.
Easy to use interface
The properties panel interface for the components is very simple and easy to understand. Designers can set the number of movie clips to appear at a time, the speed at which the movie clips fly out, and size of the area from which the movie clips start (View).
Although "Count" and "Speed" is fairly easy to grasp, I had to look up exactly what "View" did. After some thought, I couldn't think of a better word to describe it.
Custom 3D Flyout Components
Creating your own custom 3D Flyout component is another easy task. It's just a matter of putting your movie clips in the appropriate folder in the Library and drag-n-dropping the movie clips into the component's scene. An extra step of assigning instance names to the movie clips to specify their fly out order can be done as well. And that's it.
I created this component in several minutes:
Overall impression
3D Flyout saves designers time on having to maintain several pages of ActionScript on various frames and movie clips in order to create a 3D fly out effect. Those who spend a lot of time creating such effects will definitely save time by using these components.
3D Flyout runs for $19.95 and can be bought online through Methinks.com. There is a free lite version as well that allows users to try out the components, but they are not customizable.
If you don't immediately see what you want, you can start a topic in our forums.
Comments (2):
1) Posted by: jon
May 28, 2003 10:49 AM
So far I have only seen very basic flyout samples. Any examples of some more complex flyout scenes?
2) Posted by: John
May 30, 2003 10:14 PM
It is a good program, I guess, but I can do it all in code. I dont think its worth 20$, personally, it just takes a bit of initiative to code out something like this, and with unlimited posibilities in a flash environment. This program robotically makes a cheap 3d effect for a very trashy price.
Carrying on with the vision of creating commercial components for Flash MX, 
