Here's the interview with Derek and Paul on Electric Rain’s website:
[via:]
Toolbox Studios designer's Derek Goins and Paul Soupiset used the simplicity of Swift 3D's primitives and animation capabilities to transform a 2D concept space into a smooth transitioning 3D Flash website.
Interview with Derek Goins and Paul Soupiset
Tell us a little about yourself, what is your background?
Derek: I’m completely self-taught and have been doing hand illustration since I was a kid. My professional career as a Web developer, programmer and designer started at age 17. I interned at a San Antonio Web design firm and then worked as a programmer for Avalon Digital Solutions and a developer for Blue Clover Studio. My skill set includes multimedia and Web development using Flash, Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, ActionScript, CSS and JavaScript. (I’d certainly add Swift 3-D into the list, so we give it props as a web dev tool!)
Paul: My background is in design and journalism. During most of the last two decades, I focused on traditional print design as well as branding and identity; however, I’ve been designing for Web and interactive media—alongside print—since 1994.
Where do you draw your inspiration from?Paul: I tend to be inspired and energized by my environment: I find creative fuel in both urban and rural settings, and Texas provides a lot of both. For example, our design firm is situated downtown on the Riverwalk, in the heart of urban San Antonio. I love to steal away during lunch breaks to explore the architecture, the city streets, the hand-painted signage, discarded objects and hole-in-the-wall cafés and taquerías. These artifacts make their way into my moleskine sketchbook, and those pen-and-ink visual journal entries later inform my design thumbnails.
Derek: I’m inspired by things that I know the most about—personal experiences and interests like sports, sporting events and the automotive industry.
What elements of the site are made with Swift 3D?
Derek: All the major cube transitions—where the Toolbox cube morphs into various items following a click on a main menu item—are made with Swift 3D. I used Swift 3D for any sections where the visitor gets a feeling of perspective—probably a third of the site.
What features of Swift 3D did you use to create these design elements?
Derek: I used Swift 3D’s simple primitive shapes with the cube as a base primitive shape. I used the plane tool to build the news ticker that hangs off the cube in our news section. I also used Swift 3D’s timeline animation and export-to-Flash capability.
What was your biggest design challenge with the site?
Derek: Because the original design started off as two-dimensional Illustrator files, it was a trick to convert a 2D space to a 3D space. Also, it was a challenge to get the final design to work with ActionScript and Flash.
Paul: The biggest design challenge for me was to maintain the immersive feeling of the site, and to keep the transitions consistent with each other; each had to maintain a kind of simplicity so the viewer wasn’t jarred when navigating from one section to the other. We’re also planning to vary the transitions in the future, to keep our clients and guests surprised, and to continue to showcase new ideas.
What other software did you use for the site, and how did you integrate Swift 3D with these other tools?
Derek: We used a number of Adobe products including Illustrator, Bridge, Acrobat, Fireworks and Flash. My basic workflow was to import Paul’s Illustrator files into Swift 3D, animate them and do all of the measurements and timing, and then export everything to Flash.
Where would you like to see Swift 3D go in the future?
Derek: I’d like to see more of a direct integration with Flash beyond simply exporting and importing into Flash. Swift 3D needs better and more filter effects because Flash effects have surpassed Swift 3D’s effects. I’d also like to see Swift 3D implement kinetic rigging for modeling human motion. Finally, Swift 3D should add easing, which I had to do manually for our site.
Erain note: Swift 3D V5.0 has transform easing.
Do you have any Swift 3D projects in the works?
Derek: We’re expanding the design concept for our site to be more immersive. We’re using Swift 3D to create a virtual tour of the Toolbox office. We’ve created detailed illustrations of the office space. Next we’ll use Swift 3D to convert the illustrations from 2D to 3D, seam all the walls together and then use camera pans and zooms to move through the 3D space.© 2007 Electric Rain, Inc.
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