Incorporating 3d Model's Into Director 8.5

Hello again, and welcome to another weekly episode of "Helping Me Be Awesome", with me, David Heath.

This week I have been pondering over whether or not it would be a good idea to try and get something cool up and running in Director (I have Macromedia's Director 8.5, but I'm pretty certain that the newer ones should be fairly similar) using my weirdly shaped and pretty much rubbish 3D Model which I created in Blender, and then imported into 3DS Max to get the .w3d file extension. Feel free to mess around with it if you like - it has no textures, yet.

http://www.games-portal.co.uk/temp/robot.png

I've gotten hold of some kind of weird example file from somewhere online which I was trying to mess around with, but I can't seem to replace the existing Spaceship from the cast library with my own Robot. Even if I call my Robot 'Spaceship', it still doesn't see it and throws up an error. I'm not too big on this code which I've got, so thats the only thing I've tried doing so far (I think it might be Lingo, but I'm not 100%). Also, the big 3D tunnel thing is much more complex for what I'd like. I pretty much just want a floor, any colour, which my robot can roll along on it's wonderfully non-animated wheel.

Here is the example file I have: http://www.games-portal.co.uk/temp/Example.dir

Here is the robot W3D file which I exported from Blender: http://www.games-portal.co.uk/temp/ROBO.W3D

If anyone can manage to get my robot into that movie with some kind of floor then I think Mr. Pickford had better watch his back, because I'll be along soon with the next robotic-inspired Wetrix.

I now have my robot character in the 3D environment. I've also taken this chance to play around with some of the code and change some of the cursor commands. I've commented out a few of the more unecessary ones that ruin the orientation of the robot, but I've made sure that you can control him quite nicely. I've also modified the camera so it sits quite nicely behind the character (though a little low at the moment; might try and fix that a little later).

I wonder if it would be possible to take it one step further and change the background/environment completely by making it just a flat image plane that the robot moves on? I've created a kind of track image in PSP which I've tried incorporating with no real success. This ZIP contains the new modified Director file which I've gotten the robot into, the Robot character (which I've called Spaceship, so it works in the file) and the image file which I would like to replace the weird tube thing which currently resides in the movie.

http://www.games-portal.co.uk/temp/Director.zip

If anyone can work out how to do this then that'd be great. I keep getting some 'vTube' related error message.