This demo was made shortly after the initial release of Jiglib. It was a study of how far you can push realism in the sence of rendering and animation. Here CompositeMaterial is used with a BitmapMaterial and a GouraudMaterial. This is much faster then using a ShadedMaterial. All you need to do is modify the GouraudMaterial to use a transparent light map. Andy Zupko’s ShadowCaster is used for casting the die shadows. Jiglib is used for the 3D physics, also slightly modified to facilitate fixed timestep. Unfortunatelly the end result is still far from the desired 60fps. Hit spacebar too see the stats, check it out.

UPDATE: Something troubled me when checking the performance in the browser with Flash Player 10 compared to Flash Player 9. On my machine FP9 ran at approx 40fps but FP10 hardly reached 25fps. Changing the wmode from “direct” to “normal” fixed the performance issue in FP10. Especailly in Firefox the performance difference is significant. Still on my machine FP9 seems to perform slightly better then FP10. Mental note: next time take more care in setting the proper wmode.

While playing with FlickrAPI, we came up with a cool way of exploring the Flickr interestingness. It quickly became an addiction. You can view it here, we hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.

It seems that these days everyone is working on extrusion of some sort so I thought I post my experiments before it’s going to become yesterdays news

So what’s the big deal with extrusion? Well in order to do it well we first need to triangulate our vector shapes, not an easy feat in the first place but it gets really tricky when your shapes contain holes, I first used the “ear-cutting” method and then try cut out the holes form the triangulated shapes. That unfortunately created huge excess of vertices and triangles and before I could figure out how to fix it, Tim Knip has posted this fantastic method in alchemy form that triangulates polys with holes without creating any extra vertices! All I had to do I to find a way how to tell what is a hole and what isn’t, again it happend to be harder than it seems but my buggy code succeeds 90% of the time

Check out these examples:
example1, example2
you can download the code the but be warned it’s not in a very good condition.

Others have been exploring this subject as well, you can find their experiments here and here and here.

Ralph Hauwert has recently revealed some of his magic showing off the shading power of flash player 10. I was really wondering about the texture quality of the new 3d goodness so I’ve put a small skybox demo using Ralph’s branch of papervision for fp10 and this stunning shot by Roger Taylor this panoramic shoot we did of an landscape installation by Anne Walk.

I must admit I was totally stunned by the results, the quality is absolutely  amazing if you are used to 3d in fp9. The textures are silky smooth and it still runs better than dedicated panorama viewers for flash 9!

Some fullscreen(1440×900) results on my Macbook pro core duo 2.4 Ghz (santa rosa):

• standalone: 39-41 fps
• safari: 44-45 fps
• firefox: 24-25fps

These results are curieus to say the least. First of all how can flash player in safari run faster than standalone? And why is firefox running at half the speed of safari?

And what does it mean for future websites made especially for flash player 10. Well they are going to look really really good. With the help of all the other goodies (pixelbender, better font renderer, color management, h.264 support ) coming with fp10 we are going to see some really high quality productions in 2009!

Check out this fp10 panorama! Hit space for stats, use arrow keys to zoom in and out. Feel free to share your (fullscreen)results. Keep in mind that for fps counter to be meaningful the panorama must be moving.

On the penetration of flash player 10 side. There are no official numbers for adobe yet but our website ( +- 50000 visitors a month) it’s right now at 45% and growing really fast, 3-5% a week. So if you are starting an ambitious project today, consider targeting flash 10 because you don’t want your project to feel outdated by the time you launch

Source is not available for download because it’s all work in progress.

This little experiment is a proof of concept of fog using papervision’s render layers and the color transform object. This would make a lot of sense for the frustum camera where the culled triangles wouldn’t just pop out of void but would nicely fade in. Also to my surprise there is almost no performance penalty for the fog.

Take a look here or download the source.
Other interesting effect is using alphas on the render layers. 

I’ve been playing with perlin noise and have created something that reminds me of raging ocean or something a bit less natural, that is moving blue mountains  see for yourself.

For the coming soon teaser on our website, we needed crispy rendered text. Because Papervision3D is bitmap based and therefore not very good at rendering text, a nice extention would be to render vectors in 3D directly in Papervision3D. A good starting point is the beautiful Five3D engine by Mathieu Badimon. So, what I’ve done is I ported his fonts into Papervision3D. And since Mathieu also released a font conversion tool, you can create Five3D fonts yourself from any font installed on your machine! Check the 3D font example here.

Then I thought; if I can draw vector fonts in 3D, I could draw any vector shape in 3D. And what better input format to use then SVG? Lucky for me I didn’t have to write an SVG parser for AS3 because James Hight has done it already and released his source code. He has since then updated his code to support many more features of the SVG format but I haven’t had the time to implement it yet. Check an example of an imported SVG into Papervision3D here.

To cut a long story short; download the source code and make something beautiful!. And don’t forget to send us a message.

It has been raining physics engines for the past few months and i’ve been eager to experiment with physic because you can do some really cool stuff with it. Drag the hourglass to turn it around, have fun!

A 3d-ish tagcloud effect using the oldschool starfield effect. We were going to get the tags from a feed but we didn’t manage to find any “tag” feeds so the tags are hard coded for now.

We were working on a website project for which we wanted the music to be sequenced in Flash rather then loading an mp3, which would allow us to do realtime manipulation of the music sound and bpm. The logical place to start in that case is the wonderfull Popforge Library of André Michelle and Joa Ebert. We needed a sequencer engine to play our music in our project and a GUI to create the patterns in as a production tool.

André Michelle’s open-source FL-909 drummachine already contained a lot of functionality we needed. But as the FL-909 is based on the original Roland TR-909 hardware interface, functionality and soundbank, it was missing the flexibility and overview we needed for our production sequencer. So we modified the engine and GUI to add what we needed. The GUI now offers a complete graphic overview of the pattern as you program it. Triggers have individual velocity allowing for greater dynamics. And the samples are loaded externally one by one, rather then being embedded in one big chunk, allowing to manage the downloading process.

The application certainly doesn’t look as nice as André’s FL-909 but that wasn’t our main  concern, since the GUI would only be used by us during production and only the engine would run tranparently in the background of our project, providing the soundtrack. There were a few more modifications we wanted to implement, such as mute groups, a compressor behind the accent knob, the ability to sequence the pattern bank, to only name a few. However, the death of the SOUND_COMPLETE event (read the article and sign the petition) renders these efforts useless for commercial projects for the moment. And besides that, André Michelle and Joa Ebert are working on a complete Audio Suite in Flash which most certainly will also contain a very flexible sequencer. Have a look >>

Inspired by the wonderfull Audi A5 website, we set upon extending the Papervision 3D Lines3D Classes. We added perspective and fake shading to the line segments, while enhancing performance keeping it usefull for a website. Have a look >>

This is a prototype for a project we were working on which unfortunatelly got cancelled. Here we combined 180° panorama photography with camera movement. Click and drag to look around, use your arrow keys to animate and zoom in/out. Have a look >>

As an exercise we recreated some 60’s Op Art works in AS3 and made them interactive. The most difficult thing was to analyze the originals without going insane. Version 1, Version 2, Version 3.

Actionscript 3.0 has many new exciting features such as real time sound analysis and so fast that even 3d is an option. Great thanx to the papervision guys for making it possible! Have a look >>

So how much faster is actionscript 3.0 than its predecessors? Well a lot! See for your self: AS 2.0, AS 3.0. In this simple example AS3 is about 6 times faster than AS2 but there are situations where it could be up to 100 times faster. This truly is an amazing speed bump for Flash.