The financial institution Morgan Stanley have recently released information on a new online product called the Morgan Stanley Matrix. This required an eye-catching microsite for the product launch, which was built as a collaboration between Away Media and Morgan Stanley.
The site takes an immersive approach to a 3d environment, navigating between areas by flying through space in a similar manner to the site for the well known digital agency Nitrogroup.
The project was built using Awaybuilder, one of the more recent features of the Away3d engine. The Awaybuilder framework allows a seamless workflow between 3d modeling packages and Flash, enabling menus and site areas within a 3d space to be positioned and updated with ease. As a result, camera movements can be executed with pinpoint accuracy, allowing for some very nice effects – particularly with textfields.
The 3d menu text uses vector based shapes to render, another recent feature addition to Away3d. The crisp text outlines it allows are quite an improvement from text as bitmap textures. Frustum culling is used to keep framerates high even though the entire 3d scene contains many elements, thanks to the early-outs it allows for objects outside the viewing frustum.