Director's third dimension - Paul Catanese

Director's Third Dimension has been designed with the Director developer with little or no 3D experience in mind. The purpose is threefold: To explain the fundamental concepts necessary to begin working with 3D; To demonstrate how these concepts manifest themselves in Director; To demonstrate strategies for the application of these concepts in terms of specific projects, including building charts, creating interfaces, and controlling characters in a 3D environment.

The book has and abundance of demos (more than 140). At the end of every chapter, there is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions and supplemental resources that will help the reader expand their learning.

Paul Catanese is an experimental animator and interactive media artist residing in Chicago, Illinois. Paul has been working with interactive multimedia for over eight years. During that time he has used Director as well as many other interactive authoring solutions, including Hypercard, Oracle Media Objects, mTropolis, and Visual Basic. He has also worked with VRML, Java3D, and OpenGL. In addition, Paul has extensive experience with 3D modeling and animation, primarily with various versions of 3D Studio, AutoCAD, and LightScape.

Paul received his MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he now teaches digital animation and experimental imaging. Paul teaches methods that blend 3D, stop-motion, and traditional animation with experimental techniques that he uses in his own work. He also teaches how to create electronic input and output devices for building custom interfaces with computers. Paul is currently developing a class for SAIC to focus on the creation of physical objects that control or are controlled by virtual counterparts by combining the topics of 3D scanning, custom electronics, and Director 3D. In addition to his work at SAIC, Paul recently received a Technology Fellowship from Columbia College to develop a curriculum for a multipart class teaching 3D programming.

His animation has been screened internationally, notably at Animac99 in Barcelona, the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Enter Multimediale in Prague, and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, Washington. Currently, his animations are distributed through Blackchair productions in Seattle as well as Offline Networks in Ithaca, New York. Other credits include consulting on various commercial projects, such as the Director 7 and 8 certification tests at Brainbench.com, onsite and offsite Director training for three years at Mac University, and the creation of the interactive multimedia consulting company skeletonmoon.com.