Hello everyone. I posted this on StackOverflow, but related to Papervision. I was advised to look into Away3D, because Papervision is no longer supported. So I’m hoping any of you can give me a little guidance as to wether Away3D can help me with what I need to do.

It may be a silly question for people familiar with Away3D and 3D in general, but keep in mind that I’m neither of those.

Anyway, my question is, if I import a model with Away3D, is there a way to change its vertex position through code? For example if I have a head model and I would like to change it dynamically according to certain parameters, would that be even possible? Or will the model remain the same once it’s imported? Just allowing stuff like regular scaling, applying materials, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi

of course you can modifiy your meshes on a vertex level.

their are multiple methods build in away3d that can be used.

method 1: skeletonAnimation - in your 3dApplication (3dsMax/maya/blender/c4d) you can create a skeleton that controls the movement of the mesh.

method 2: in your 3dApplication, you can create different poses of your mesh as Blendshapes/morphtargets. Inside of Away3d you are able to morph your mesh between these poses.

method 3: reposition verticles manually. You can always manually set the postion of the verticles the mesh is made of. but thats only making sense for meshes with small number of verticles.

method 4: using modifiers. you can write your own modifier, that modifiys all the verticles of a mesh, using the same calculation / formula. For example i wrote a class, that morphes any given mesh into a sphere.

method 5: using elevation/highmaps. you can use a grayscale image, to move verticles along their normals (also called displacement-maps).

i think thats the main options you have to modify meshes dynamically.
Depending on your needs, i would stick to option 1 or 2, but both need some preperations done in a 3d-application, and than need to be correcty imported into away3d (use the awd2 format for skeletonAnimation, and the md2-format for VertexAnimation)

Hope that helps