As soon as I saw an early version of the music video shot in Ottowa for the single off his new “In a Cabin With” album, I thought; this should be interactive. So now three months later; here it is.
Read on for some behind-the-scenes technical details. (more…)
I’m proud to announce that I’ll be speaking at the upcoming actionscript conference / flash camp in Singapore 14th, 15th September. I’ll be presenting Papervision3D and show some of the projects we currently are working and explain how we approach them.
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.
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 
(more…)
James Height is at it again (that’s the guy who wrote the svg parsing code I used for vectorvision). He’s just released some code that allows you to use truetype fonts without the need of creating Font3D files. Check it out here on James’ blog.
What if Joseph and Mary had access to faster modes of transportation when seeking a place to give birth? And what would have happened if they had taken a wrong turn leading them away from Bethlehem? Those are questions that have been occupying the minds of theologists for centuries. Finally, with the help of today’s latest 3D technology, Y & R, Flashfabriek and Barcinski & Jeanjean have tried to answer those questions. Have a look.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Mark & Adrien
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.
But this is not sad news my friends. Recently I’ve been asked to join papervision team and integrate vectorvision in it. So naturally I agreed, hey who wouldn’t want to work with such a talented bunch.
In the previous article we talked about how we shot our footage in stereo. Now we are going to talk about how to render those stereo images for 3D glasses. And how to render Papervision3D for 3D glasses.
Well, here it is. After 3 months of hard work fun our “Coming Soon” page has finally been replaced by a brand new website. The coming weeks we will be posting a series of “Making of” articles about our use of Papervision3D, Vectorvision, 3D Physics, Photography and more. Today a few lines on the general concept of the website.
We are proud to announce that our vectorvision library came second in the Paperking3D contest. Cool.
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.
We are currently working on our own website, which is a lot of fun. Since the website still needs a lot of work we made a little Coming Soon page which gives some hints of what the website is going to contain. If you have some 3D glasses laying around you are in for a little Anaglyph treat. The 3D fonts are also quite special. These are Vector fonts rendered in the Papervision3D engine. More about vectors in Papervision3D coming in a later post. Meanwhile, check this.
This is a modified version of our interactive installation featured at FITC Amsterdam. The actual bluetooth presence service has been replaced by a scripted simulator which randomly adds and removes people from the installation. Enter your name in the popup field in the bottom and you will be playing an instrument too!
As promised before the source of this installation can be downloaded here. Feel free to modify and use the source. All we ask is, if you do use it, document it somehow and post a comment back here. Thanx.
We are proud to announce our interactive installation at the FITC Amsterdam event. The installation will be installed in the Felix Meritis building in Amsterdam during the whole 3 days of the conference (Feb 24 – Feb 26) and is also accessible to visitors without tickets for FITC. So, if you missed out on the tickets before they sold out, you can still experience it.
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 >>
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 >>
