Integrating Product-, and UI Design in animations

Special Interest Areas interaction design
1

I am wondering if anyone has a good workflow for these things:

  1. In the past I have seen cellphone companies have interactive presentation of their products, where you can tumble, zoom, interact with the product (flip lid etc) but also interact with the UI of the device. Anyone know how to do this? (prob a software that can export a 3d geometry with mapped flash?)

  2. Another question is how to have a linear animation of something like a cellphone, with a mapped flash on the screen. I want to make an animation of the device and at the same time show the UI and how that works. (Can it all be done in a 3d program or is it neccessary to use for example after effects for mapping the UI?)

Thanks

2

If you want to interact with it, flash overlaid on a 3D animation (3D animation brought into Flash and then the 2D laid on top) is a solid way to do this.

The issue with interacting with the UI is you will ideally want to have it only be in a planar view. Flash doesn’t like moving things in 3D very much and while it is possible it will probably be more headache then its worth.

If you want the UI moving on the screen of your device, (but not interactive) then render out your flash UI as a movie from either Flash or After effects, and apply it as an animated texture to the screen in your rendering package. Then when you render your animation the UI will be playing.

Check out the Nexus One demo. It’s not as interactive as you described, but it is a nice implementation of interacting with the 3D.

http://www.google.com/googlephone/tour/

3

Thanks! The Nexus One tour is nice, I also found another example, which is pretty nice:
http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/xperiax10?cc=se&lc=sv

But yeah, as you say, they are not interactive in the way that you can control the UI yourself… while still also being able to tumble the device in 3d.