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.

There are some big changes happening to vectorvision due to the fact that we are adding triangulation for the fonts, I will write more on it in other post. Other stuff recently added to vectorvision is:
word3d is now text3d and as you would expect form text it now supports multiline, align, letter-spacing, and line-spacing and all can be changed on the fly. see example.

I also have been experimenting with scalable outlines and the results are already very interesting, see this example.

The source code can be found in the vectorvision repository.

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 After 3 months of hard work fun our “Coming Soon” page has finally been replaced by a brand new website.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

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.