DOWNLOAD THE 3dD BASIC KIT
The 3dD Basic Kit is  a FREE basic scenery where you can make the exercices of our tutorial.
The kit has  a basic 3ds max world: kitb.max that is only a  floor 
and a Director world : kitb.dir. The movie has four scripts: setupscript  avatarobj  cameraobj and  timestep 
Normaly you will put YOUR code in the avatarobj script using one of the two methods: 
new - for one-time execution code or control - for code inside the timestep-loop.
In our lessons we will use the 3dD Basic Kit like a pre-requirement for the exercices 
and make references to it.
To download the files right-click the links, saving the target in your PC:
 kitb.dir - 52kb      kitb.max - 197 kb
You can see a demo of the world at: 3dD Basic Kit demo-world 

Why every tutorial about 3D has this infamous "rotating boxes"? I don't know. Perhaps because they are an easy example of rotation.

In Director we have, for rotation:

myworld.model("object").transform.rotate(myworld.model("object"), upvect, r)

upvect is the vector that defines the base axis of rotation.

The important resource that Director has is that we can define the pivot axis of the rotation. In our general statement above we used: myworld.model("object") like an argument defining that , the pivot axis is in the center of object. But think about a pivoting door: the pivot axis is not in the center of the door! We can create a hinge. The center of the hinge will be the pivot axis.

The most correct general statement for rotation is:

myworld.model("object").transform.rotate(myworld.model("object of the axis of rotation"), upvect, r)

We will make a demo of a pivoting door in the next lesson. Now, lets go to create our infamous "dancing cube". Really will be not a cube. We will rotate our plaque with logo.

In our 3dD Basic Kit we have a script glued to the frame where is the sprite of the world. The timestep script. We will put the code there:

on prepareframe me
 global avatarobj, cameraobj, myworld 
  
 control avatarobj
 control cameraobj

  
   myworld.model("logo").transform.rotate(myworld.model("logo").worldposition, avatarobj.upvect, 2) 
 

end 

on exitFrame me
 go the frame
end

What is new, is in red.

Important to note that: the base axis is declared using a definition created inside the avatarobj script. So: the declaration is: avatarobj.upvect.

We are using the prefix myworld; so: we need to declare this object like a global property.

Look! The logo is dancing :-)

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