Interactive Animations

ysiegel

Salutations!

I am in the planning stages of a project which will hopefully (G-d willing) be up on a public website. It's supposed to be an interactive animation, where there will be several items on a table, and clicking on each item will cause it to animate and display an info panel next to it.

The question is: what part of this is up to me and what is up to the site-techies?
The obvious part is modeling the table with all the objects on it. Then I figure I'll have to do an individual animation for each object as I want it to act when clicked on. But will all the footage be enough for the website guys to work with and make an interactive game? Or is there anything I should know about...?

RN

Hi. Unless your web developers also moonlight as artists you'll have to provide them with all the assets (images, text, audio, 3D models etc.) and they'll take care of assembling the animation-rich pages for you using programming.

Since you're the only one who knows exactly what the website should be like, you'll have to provide them with a design document that details what the website is, what pages it should have and how the user should interact with those pages.

Regarding the technology, you can have realtime 3D elements on a webpage, but support is limited (like 3D, on a browser, on a mobile device, it's gonna have a lot of overhead!), so think about what kind of devices you want to support.
Maybe you might want to use 3D because of the appeal, but you can still do a lot of things with just clever 2D and animation (like using prerendered images of 3D things, on PNGs with transparency).

Example of 2D-only websites (both use PixiJS):
- http://karta.kolmarden.com/
- http://www.mylittlepony.movie

And with 3D (uses Blend4Web):
- https://www.blend4web.com/en/demo/tut_playroom/