The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of news and rumors about Flash, with the funny thing being that surprisingly little of it actually had anything to actually do with the Macromedia product itself. The long and short of this recent Flash flurry is that a lot of it points, either directly or indirectly, to the emergence of yet another "Flash Killer," this time with our fine friends in Redmond driving the bus.

3D lighting, and "real world" lighting for that matter, is a lot like hair. Good hair can radically enhance even the plainest of faces, while a mullet (for example) tends to uglify those who might otherwise be "purty" (as some are wont to say in my neck of the woods). By the same token, good 3D lighting can make even the simplest scene beautiful, while bad 3D lighting can turn your meticulously crafted objects, pixel-perfect surfacing, and butter-smooth keyframing into a flat, uninteresting mess. But, as we'll see during the course of this series, it really doesn't take a lot to get into that good 3D lighting frame of mind. So let's start the ball rolling by going over what the art of the possible is with LightWave's lights.

Now that Flash MX 2004 has been out for a while, it's time to revisit the juggernaut web animation / multimedia authoring / rich internet application development / whatever-else-Macromedia's-marketing-department-wants-it-to-be-this-week package to see how it's holding up after a bit of the ol' scrutiny. And, as is quickly becoming the norm with a mature product such as Flash, it's not an automatic slam-dunk to come up with a single recommendation as to whether it may be right for you.