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.

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 After 3 months of hard work fun our “Coming Soon” page has finally been replaced by a brand new website.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. 

The vision for the panorama view came to us in november last year while we were brainstorming on another project (the one for which we prototyped a spherical video panorama). We would stand in one of Amsterdam’s many beautiful scenes with everybody around us walking by going about their business. Around us our portfolio work would be hanging in the air in the form of paper flyers. Envisioning viewing that with 3D glasses being able to move around us, filled us with excitement. We are already familiar with viewing photo’s and movies with 3D glasses, but I can’t really say I had had an interactive experience using 3D glasses before. 

By creating a 360º panorama from a stop motion video rather than from multiple stills stitched together, allowed us to capture the movement of the subjects in the scene. The price to pay however was much bigger file size. To make up for the wait while the video content preloads before being granted access to the panorama view we thought it would be cool to revamp the traditional Pong waiting game into a solitary 3D version that could also benefit from viewing with 3D glasses.

But the added file size was worth it. When we first reached the point in development that we had a placeholder 360º video panorama overlaid with a badly keyed-out test shoot of us taken in from of a purple screen (yes, we hadn’t ordered the green screen yet), that we realized just how interesting it actually is to gently turn the 360º and observe the many people, boats and occasional “motor agent”, as they call them here in Holland, pass by.

The location was almost an automatic choice. Besides the fact that it’s beautiful, it’s right around the corner from our studio. But this is mearly the first panorama to feature on the site. As it’s simply a question of modifying some XML to change the panorama in the website, and, well, shooting the new footage of course, we plan on adding new panoramas to the site in the future, probably starting with a new shoot this fall.

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!