Click the image or here to play Away3D basketball! :)

Just like my previous post of materials “ala” Pete, well here are physics “ala” Pete.

 I decided to HACK some code together to get the effect I want (basically), and although I know the math may be flawed, it is something that I can use A LOT. It is a “custom” engine that works with both away3d and papervision3d.

This demo is just a preview of what I would like to share, but I want correct the math before I release it.

_pete

People are starting to use Away3d for their projects! Paul Spitzer wrote a path finding demo for Flash in 3d:

http://www.actionscriptarchitect.com/lab/AStar3D2/

Shirotokoro has written a new AS3 Geom Class Exporter for 3ds Max to PV3D, Sandy and Away3D:

http://seraf.mediabox.fr/showcase/as3-geom-class-exporter-for-3ds-max-english/

and I, for one, welcome our yellow billed overlord (read the page to find out :)…

http://www.puppet-arena.com/

It’s great that people are finding Away3d useful! We’re continuing to work hard on adding new features!

While busy cleaning the code from yesterday, i’ve added one more thing: a mask for the whole texture.
It sounds overkill at first sight since you can use a png with alpha, but do you remember how heavy those little friends can be?
Anyway, for those interested, it will now be possible to create a mask from a very sharp movieclip or an external image.

Because you can choose how to apply the mask (see my last post for more on applying masks) an extra parameter is required: true or false.

This will mask the entire result - used in the above demo
new Bump(mybumpsource, mylightmap, mymode, mymask, true);

This will mask only the bitmap result - used in the previous demos
new Bump(mybumpsource, mylightmap, mymode, mymask, false);

Here’s another quick demo, just to demonstrate the flexibility of this class:
4 planes, 4 exact same bitmapdata’s, 4 different results with this class, and i’m not counting the environment normal mapping coming up. Notice the way 2 planes are rendered where a mask is being defined. The boolean parameter is set to true on one of them.

Fabrice

After 3 weeks vacation with nothing but a pencil and a notebook, i had wrote down some idea’s for this class i wanted to test. Since you guys seem to like my blog, (my stats are growing very fast lately), i thought it was time to post some new demos. These are dev workfiles, this means: no fancy models, no nice textures and there are still many things to be done in the code, from improving perf to new features. These demos are just outputs while writing.

What’s new in these ones?
The class has been updated to the composite idea - if you are familiar with Away3D
or PV this means that in your code you would usually make a material like this:

var material = new BitmapMaterial(mybitmapdata);

Now you can pass some graphical fx to it.
for the first demo you would do something like this:

var bump = new Bump(mybump);
var material = new BitmapMaterial(mybitmapdata, {}, [bump]);

The third param is an array, meaning when this code is released there will be more than just a bump to push in that array…
So what happens? When the material generates the faces the bitmapData is updated, and the next fx in the array will then use the resulting bitmapData from the previous. This is very nice because a different order in the array can create some completely different results. And believe me, you will soon want to save every swf outputted like i do, because they are nice to look at! The class has 3 other features -

1) it can use its own lightmap, like previous demos.

2) it can use an environment lightmap (this one is in development since some serious changes must be made into the core of the engine).

3) it can use an option that enables you to mask a part of the fx, allowing you to create some interesting materials, like rust on chrome etc..

This one demonstrates the bump applied with the texture mode set to overlay (forgot to mention, you also can set blendmodes on a texture)…
var bump = new Bump(mybump, mylightmap, “overlay”);

This one illustrate the mask being set, creating some very interesting fx.
var bump = new Bump(mybump, mylightmap, “overlay”, mymask);

I have more ideas to test/write from my notebook.

Fabrice