I’ve turned 40 this weekend, so i thought it would be nice to celebrate…
First idea was: i do a cake! Nah… doesn’t shine…
Since Away3D is now able to create anything looking expensive like gold or silver, i thought, what’s the most expensive material on earth? Diamonds of course!

Everyone who has played with transparent objects knows you need alpha info, and then… well here it comes, what comes next? You need something to move light! So most go for double geometry, above each other. Did that too, but then you get a z-sorting artifact, all faces are swapping on and off. Useless.
So i’ve updated the enviroMaterial again to render faces another way…

Enjoy the Away3D diamond! The right amount of shinyness and face count!

Fabrice

It’s been a while since my last post on materials. I thought it might be good to let see we are VERY busy right now with Away3D.
One of the latest feature, like this demo shows, is the normal mapping. Now natively implemented in the engine.

Any mesh using this new Material will reflect the environement or a given reflection map.
This is the first of this kind of materials and i have already a few more in the making.
How would you find being able to add phong shading coming from a given light source to your model?

Check this blog to see soon more of that shiny stuff!
Away3D rocks people!

k, Back to code now… too much fun!

Fabrice
PS: Rob is actually busy merging our codes for the next release.
PS2: Right click on model, open the Flashplayer menu, and select Away stats if you want some fps details…

Update
Made some tests last nite.
Code seams stabile and perform pretty well no matter model geometry being loaded…
Tried a 4206 faces overkill head model. FPS dropped down to 2fps and on init of the mesh the head.obj needed arround 2 seconds to intialize due to enormous amount of precalculations. The hummingbird model however with a respectable 974 faces count was running at a steady 25 fps very smootly.
I will try to improve the code on this…

Ok no pixels news for once…
I was tired building in each project an FPS (frames per second) counter or add traces everywhere.
So i thought it might be usefull to build once and for all an handy tool that would require no external swf or to be set in the library. This little device generates itself and is available at anytime in any Away3d projects. It will use a little calculation power only when on screen. Just right click or ctrl/press on the mac to display it on screen.

HOW TO INSTALL IN YOUR PROJECT? Just compile and run the swf and call the player menu! Nothing!

Check this destructive demo that demonstrate how the color indicator behaves.(Don’t wait till your browser crashes!)

When on screen, you’ll be able to access some helpfull informations for any projects development like:

fps
swf framerate
highest fps and lowest fps
average fps
ram usage
faces count
active camera information
mesh count
geometrie information
face rendered count
The stats window is also draggable, so it can stay on screen while testing.
It also has a color information coupled to performance based on swf framerate and actual FPS. The more fps on that scale, the more the bar gets greenshish and that means your project’s gonna be a killer! While going on the other side of the scale it will tint to red and that would probably mean: back to the drawingboard!
If users are finding it handy, we will probably extend it with more features, like debugging options.
Soon in the svn…

Fabrice