From the course: iBooks Author Essential Training

Adding a 3D object - iBooks Author Tutorial

From the course: iBooks Author Essential Training

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Adding a 3D object

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- Now let's create a 3D widget and add it into our Explore California travel guide. If you're following along, I'm on page 27 in the "Taste of California" section. To create a 3D widget object, all you need to do is to go up to your toolbar and click on Widgets and then select the 3D option from the dropdown menu. A 3D widget object is created for us and our Widget Inspector is automatically opened up. We can then change the type of object from an anchored object to a floating object, and move the object into position using our alignment guides. We can then grab the handle at the bottom of the object and drag it down into place, so that it snaps the full height of the column. Now we're ready to add our 3D object. To add a 3D object, all you need to do is drag any Collada file, which has a .dae file extension, just directly onto here. I'm going to go over to my Finder, and in the Chapter 10 folder, there's a folder called 3d files. In here there's two documents: Bottle.dae and bottle.tif. And I'd like to give a shoutout to Adam Crespie, who's another author here at Lynda.com, and he happened to be in recording a title, and he created this 3D object for me in 3D Studio Max. We then exported the document out of 3D Studio Max and we also exported it out of Maya, just to test and make sure that both applications would work properly. You can also create a document directly in the free 3D program Google SketchUp. All you need to do is make sure when you export the document you export it as a .dae file. Let's go ahead and preview the document to see what it looks like. Click one time on the file, and then press the spacebar on your keyboard to open up the file in Quick Look. You can then grab the bottle and drag around with your mouse to look at all the different points of view of the bottle. The label that's been added to the bottle is what's in the second file, that's called bottle.tif. I'll go ahead and preview that document as well. If you'd like an interesting challenge, go ahead and open up this document in your favorite image editor such as Photoshop, and then go ahead and edit the .tif file. Just don't change the dimensions or the name of the file and make sure that the .tif file remains in the same location as the bottle file. Then when you preview the bottle file, it'll have your custom label wrapped around the bottle. Let's go ahead and add the Bottle.dae file directly into our iBooks Author document. We'll do this by grabbing the Bottle.dae file and simply dragging and dropping it right inside of the 3D widget. We can then click inside of iBooks Author and click one time on the widget to make sure it's selected. Next, let's look at the widget options that we have for a 3D object. The 3D object file has been added in the Interaction tab for us. If you wanted to choose a different file, you could click the Choose button and navigate and grab another file. Next, we have the ability to set object rotation. Currently it's set to Free Rotation, meaning the user can grab the object and they can spin it in any direction they choose. You can also choose to allow the user to only rotate in the horizontal, or in the horizontal and vertical direction. I like Free Rotate, because it gives the user the most freedom to explore the object that we've added on to the book for them. We can choose to auto-rotate the object when the object is appearing on the iPad, but the user is not necessarily interacting with it. This is a nice effect, and it lets the user know that there's something there that they can grab and interact with. Let's go ahead and go to the Layout tab and change our Title, Label, from Interactive to Figure so it matches all the other labels throughout our book. We'll want to make sure we have our caption and check our background for this particular object. We can then go ahead up to the title of the object by clicking on it one time, selecting the text, and then typing in our title. In this case, I'll type in "Two Trees "Premium Olive Oil". Finally, we can set the caption of our object by clicking down at the bottom, and then triple-clicking on the description, and typing in our own description. I'll type in "3D Interactive Bottle of Two Trees "Premium Olive Oil". Our 3D object is now completed inside of our iBooks Author document. Remember, you can create your own objects in free programs such as Google SketchUp, or you can also download free objects directly off of the web from a variety of different locations. If you happen to be skilled in creating 3D tools and there's a lot of great training titles here at Lynda.com on how to do this, go ahead and feel free to create your own objects. Just make sure you export them in the Collada .dae file format, and they should go directly in to your iBooks Author document.

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