Until now , we can only use BitmapMaterial to present text or text content in 3d space, there is no way to draw or display pure 3D Text in Away3d 4.0 ...Could you please tell us whether this feature is already in your TODO list ?

It is, as are all other features from 3.x. However, pure vector text is a really complex matter on the GPU, whereas in the Flash drawing API (which was used for previous engines) it’s very easy to draw curves.

Text will most likely not make it into 4.0, but might be in a subsequent dot release towards the beginning of next year. If you urgently need dynamic text (i.e. you cannot load a model of the text) you will have to write some sort of tessellation algorithm yourself unfortunately. Let us know if you end up doing that, and maybe it can be contributed as a part of the Away3D 4.x text features.

You could perhaps create a TextField instance, set a text and font, then draw the field onto a bitmapdata and use Elevation class to create a 3D mesh from it?

It should work

Vantage Point;  I provided some feedback to you using the forum’s private messaging facility.  Perhaps each member makes his own determination as to whether or not that facility is enabled.  I suppose you never saw the posting.

In any case, over the past 150 hours of porting since posting, I have managed to migrate most of the Bunko 3D graphics workbench to the latest release of Away3D, Version 4.  While it is a rather large body of code, as I am seeing results with Render Mode set to direct, I am pretty confident that I will be able to trouble-shoot the remaining issues.  So if you are interested, please let me know.  I have not even begun to re-write the Developer’s Guide, but will do that if there is any interest in using the tool.  [The version that was developed for Away3D, FP_10, by the way, is working with AIR 3.0 and FP_13 using the FP_10 code base where you have a 3D graphics requirement that does not require GPU assist.]

Bunko 3D graphics workbench? What is that? I googled it but didn’t see anything

Sorry, Bunko was developed in 2009 to provide true 3D Text for Away, PV and Sandy.  Here is a screen shot from a test a couple of minutes ago of the letter ‘Q’ from the Amienne font.  It’s been in the test suite for some time because it has a slightly more complex computation of the holes in the triangulation sub-routine.

Sorry about the cockamamie orientation, this is just a test tool that gives me quick visual confirmation of whether or not triangulation succeeded and the materials and lighting were correctly applied to the geometric shapes.  I hope it shows up, the forum imposes a size limit on the images.

ah cool, looks like you are well on your way to solving 3D text for Away3D! Keep us updated

Ok, here’s the update.  I hope folks looking for 3D text to run with Away3D 4.0 will find something here that they can use.  If so, I will complete the productization of Bunko and ship it to anyone who requests a copy.

I hope that the attached summary is helpful.

I apologize for not having a server environment that is very robust.  This URL ought to be up most of the time,

BunkoTest

but the bandwidth is pretty minimal and the source may be out of date by a line or two.

One of the most complex formats for 3D Text that Bunko supported with Away3D 3.x was Intaglio.  As that capability depended upon the type of two-sided face support that existed in the old API, it required some re-engineering for 4.x.

As of today, the demo, shows an Intaglio format.

With that, the Bunko 3.0 migration to GPU-rendered 3D Text, is functionally complete.  I hope you will find it useful.

BTW, most visitors don’t seem to be taking advantage of the context menu to let you download the source code—that’s the main point of the demo.

Hey cool stuff.

Looking at the source it seems to be missing lots of classes maybe you can setup a svn on googlecode or git at github ?

Cheers,
Ringo.

I have completed a pretty thorough authoring of ASDocs for the Bunko Runtime API.  It can be accessed on the demo site as well as a new demo. which has ViewSource showing how it was produced with the API.

The demo is The Latest Demo—Neon..

The docs are Bunko Runtime API.

I have not yet started the re-write of the Bunko Workbench Developer’s Guide.  As originally posted, I won’t spend that week unless/until there is a large enough user community to make it worthwhile.  In the meantime, I will continue to provide one-on-one tutorial/walk-thrus for those needing to create special fonts.

Thanks for all the interest in using Bunko to add compelling 3D Text to your scenes.

Great.

import com.sss.events.ProtoGlyphEvent;
import com.sss.extrusion.FontFactory;
import com.sss.extrusion.ProtoDress;
import com.sss.extrusion.ProtoGlyph;

Where can one find those classes ?

I guess when I tried to upload a test suite for the testing of memory management, I learned that this forum’s software has a restrictive idea of what may be uploaded, so let’s see if I just rename Bunko.swc to Bunko.zip, it will let me send it that way, since I use .rar and it doesn’t like .rar archives.

so I’m still not clear on how to use this. Do we change bunko.zip back to bunko.swc include it as a library and go from there? Can you give us a basic code example?

WBDG = Workbench Developer’s Guide
RTDG = Runtime Developer’s Guide

But I cannot do any new demos until the new Away3d Alpha API becomes available and solves the problems of memory leaks when Mesh objects are dynamically added and removed from a scene.  All I can do is monitor the commits on the texturerefactor branch and see how badly the new classes and methods change the interface contract with the current Bunko architecture.

In the meantime, I am integrating with the Bullet Physics so that GlyphMesh objects will behave nicely in a world of gravity and impulse.  It might be possible to create an equivalent to the game of Boogle where the initial set of objects remains constant, but most of the other interesting Word Games depend upon deleting old objects and adding new ones during the course of play.

Are you planning to release any source code instead of a swc ?
If so can you setup like googlecode/github for it ?

Cheers,
Ringo.