A few years back while in college, I was messing around with augmented reality in flash. Specifically, the rendering of higher quality 3D models. World of Warcraft being the low-poly fun fest seemed like the perfect fit for the experiment. The result is a step by step guide from taking a character in WoW and attaching it to an augmented reality marker.
Let’s start off with a list of programs that you will need in order to make your World of Warcraft character in Flash with Augmented Reality. All of the programs listed below are available for a trial period.
- A web cam
- Access to a printer
- World of Warcraft
- WoW model viewer
- Milkshape 3D
- Adobe Flash CS4
- FLAR Away3D
Open up WoW Model Viewer. Remember, you must have World of Warcraft installed on your system in order to do this tutorial. Once you get the model viewer open you will notice a list on the left side of your screen. This is all of the models for WoW that are located in the .mpq files on your computer. Scroll down until you see Murloccostume. Click on the [+] to expand the directory down, and then select the murloccostume_noflag.m2 file. A useful tip for when you may be using a different character is to open the Model control window(Window>Model Control). The lower the geosets, the better since what we’re doing in flash only wants 1 texture file.
Next, go to File -> Export Model(Init Position). Be sure to save the file somewhere you remember as we will be using it in the next step
Start up Milkshape 3D. Go to File -> Open, then locate to where you saved the .ms3d file from WoW Model Viewer. When it open it should look similar to the image below. Don’t worry about all the blue lines that are all over the model, we’re just going to leave those alone for now.
That’s all we’re doing in Milkshape 3D! So now go to File -> Export -> Quake2MD2 at the top of the list. You will get an error message, ignore it as it doesnt pertain to what we’re doing. Remember where you save this file, as there is a texture file that is saved with it that we will be needing in the following steps.
On to Flash CS4! At this point you want to navigate to where you extracted the FLARDEMO.rar file on your computer. Once there, go into the assets folder and copy your md2 file you exported from Milkshape3D and the texture file associated with it and paste them in this folder.After you have done that, go back to the src folder and open up the FLARdemo.as file as well as the FLARdemo.fla file.
In the FLARdemo.as file, goto line 54 and change it to[Embed(source="../assets/murloc.md2", mimeType='application/octet-stream')], and change line 58 to[Embed(source="../assets/murloc_1.png")] and that’s it! now Ctrl+ENTER to test the .swf file for any errors. The marker file that you will need to actually see your image come to life will be available once you complete the quiz for this excercise.
Here are the downloads for :
So that’s that. Here’s some background animations i created in After Effects for that project.
*World of Warcraft and all relating characters and artwork are ©Blizzard Entertainment.