Win a 3D Flash Gallery!

This is a great opportunity for all the readers! Thanks for flashloaded we’re giving 3 free licenses of 3D Wall Pro ($199/each).

To win the prize is very simple, just leave a comment to this post with at least “I want the license” text besides any other comment and after 12 days we will select randomly 3 winners! ( remember to leave your email in the comment )

What is 3D Wall?

The 3D Wall is a papervision powered component to isplays images on an engaging interactive 3D wall. This PRO version can also display FLV videos and SWF’s and more..

Some of the key features of the 3D Wall are:

  • Flat or curved wall
  • Customizable animations
  • Glow and reflections
  • Double sided thumbnails
  • Complete customizable properties (rows, columns, preloader…)
  • Complete interaction (keyboard or mouse)
  • Use of external xml configuration file
  • A Flash component inspector
  • Images, flv and swfs
  • Customizable video controls
  • Youtube, flickr images
  • Watermarks

Here’s a couple of screenshots:

See more screenshots at the 3D Wall page

REMEMBER: Winners will be selected randomly from commenters 10 days later (31 October 2008) and will be contacted directly via email.

Contest is over!

Today (1st November 2008) the contest is over! After running this mysql query to find out 3 random commenters:
SELECT * FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_entry_id = 268 order by RAND() LIMIT 3
we got the three winners who are: (5170) moon, (5135) Pieter and (5176) tm!

Use Away 3D man …

… or at least give it a try!

Working on Aviary I had the plesure to meet Alexander and Fabrice, the creator and one of the actual maintainers of Away 3D engine.

As you might known, we are using Away 3D for Hummingbird, and I had the plesure (yes, another :P) to give a look at the code an work in touch with the developers. I have to admit that Away 3D is really good!

I’m far to be the best person to suggest one framework over the others, but what I can do is tell you why I think Away 3D is (at least) worth a try, even if you are already working with Papervision 3D or the other engines. The first thing to know is that both the projects comes from the same branch – they have been splitted a few years ago (maybe just an year but I’m not sure) and then they followed two different paths. During my quick and basic experience with Away 3D I see that it has a real clean and powerful API (you have animation for instance or really good materials), good documentation and tutorials (see Fabrice‘s blog for a bunch of them!), more precise a quick rendering. And part of the new Papervision 3D 2.0 code is inspired by that library.

The various libraries outta there are for different purposes, and probably are taking (or will take) different directions (ie: see Alternativa 3D for instance, which seems well suited for games). But trying many of them instead focusing only on the most famous one is a really good thing – many users comes from PV3D for instance and are really happy about Away!

Don’t take my assumptions as gold: this is what I think after just a bit of playing 😉

Papervision3D component for Flash CS3

John Grden just released an amazing component for Flash CS3 for manage papervision3d on Flash IDE.

– Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE
– 3 Material types supported – BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial
– Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera
– Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]
– Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]
– Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around
– Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]
– New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-time

Download component here
See the presentation video

Papervision3D at google code: http://code.google.com/p/papervision3d/

SoundMixer with Papervision3d & ImageProcessing

Recently I’ve joined the papervision3d mailing list and started to make some little test with 3ds max exported files just to see how it works and its performances.
There are various demos around the net about papervision and all of them are really impressive. Unfortunately my skills with 3D studio max are less than zero and so I could test only with basic objects..

BTW, after I’ve discovered also this great library (ImageProcessing) I decided to make a test with both the libraries together to create some effects to be used in a SoundMixer movie.

Here the result of my experiment: Main.html

Once the music starts click on the stage with mouse to change the visualization effect.
There are 6 different effects.
For the papervision objects I used these .dae files: cube.dae, plane.dae and sphere.dae ( download them )

Nice 3D engine

Today I published under the Flash Download section a 3D engine which Antonin Stefanutti sent to me. 3DFS’s features are :

  • polygonal object rendering (a face can be any 3D convex polygon);
  • camera management (track, dolly, tumble, pan & shake functions);
  • visible surface determination via S-Buffer implementation (perfect object intersection);
  • clipping (front, left, right, back planes);
  • backface culling (per object or face enabling);
  • flat shading with lighting coefficients : ambiant, diffuse & specular;
  • variable rendering resolution and simple variable blur rendering;
  • user defined object mouse events : onMouseOver, onPress, onRelease, etc;
  • usual math transformations : scaling, Euler & quaternion rotating, etc;
  • XML format scene loader;
  • command line 3DS Max ‘.ASE’ format converter (‘tri’ or ‘quad’ modes available);

I found this project very clear and well done, even if I never got into 3D stuff in deep (I didnt want headache at all…)

Here some examples:

For more info visit: http://3dfs.alpha-sigma.net/3DFS.html His files are released under the GNU General Public License

Download it here:

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