I’ve just put together a demo, using a technique I’ve been working on for taking animation data from 3D Studio MAX to Away3D 4.

http://videometry.net/broomstick/Curtain.html

It’s basically a vertex animation. The useful thing is that the data is stored as a movie, so you could actually stream it to you scene.
The other nice thing is that its independent of the mesh resolution.
This gives you infinite LOD (Level of Detail) which was what I need for one of my current projects.

The curtain is just a plane, with the “video spacewarp” applied to it.
You can change the number of segments in the plane while the animation is running.

Let me know what you think, and how it performs. Sometimes I forget I’m on a monster machine. It uses less than 6% for me, not bad for a cloth simulation (which this isn’t! Though who would know :O)

Next I’ll be adding wind speed, and trying to get it to loop nicely…

Cheers!

I don’t have hardware acceleration on my ancient Dell and it works well. Reasonably fast and smooth.

Excellent ! 6% as you on a 3 years old midle game pc ! Do you plan to publish your source code ?

Samuel

Very cool works good here as well (also monster machine though:))!

Nice Peter,nice demo again ! Detail is nice ...Cheer!

By the way , can you use a colorful material with better shadering and lighting ?and a little larger scene resolution is preferred ...I can collect this demo in the upcoming Away3d 4.0 Show Reel 2011.

cheers guys! :O)

I’ve updated with an attempted loop (ping pong) and, as promised, a control for how much wind you’ve got (phnar). I could write a small book on how to do it, but I’ve elected to make a blog post for now…

http://videometry.blogspot.com/2011/09/playing-havok-with-flash-11.html

The animation shown is 2Mb, but that’s with a keyframe every single frame, which isn’t generally necessary. Much lower res maps work well, but I wanted to stress test. Extending the technique you could use it for streaming head morphs with speech (using audio channel of video, duh), animate entire forests of trees, anything really.

Have a great weekend,

Cheers!

Hi Vantage, there’s zoom on mouseWheel, and fullscreen option.
If I have time I’ll make something with a less boring motif!

very very cool stuff.

i would really love to see that source…

how did you create the video?

like the idea behind this.

running at decent speed on my lenovo.

can you tell me more about using this technique for facial animation (morphshapes) ?

i started with learning 3d stuff 2 years ago, because i wanted to have realtime talking heads on a website (for music clips).
with this technique, maybe finally i got there.

VantagePoint > I just posted another version that might be better suited for your showreel :O)
http://videometry.net/atomizer/test.html (I also take requests

The project has now got a name, “atomizer”. And yes, you can do other things apart from curtains.

80prozent > The animation file is made by a plug-in I’ve written for 3D Studio MAX. At the moment it’s in alpha, but I need it myself for an upcoming project, so it will be actively developed over the coming months.

For talking heads you would use all Max’s tools for morph targeting/lip synching, etc and then export to a movie that contains morph targets embedded in video and perfectly in synch with the audio track (in theory at least!)

I apologise in advance for the lack of preloaders, must do something about that…

nice one, Pete. So it kind of works like height maps with grey-scale pixel brightness?

It’s been a while.  Did you ever get your 3DS Max plugin out of alpha?  I would like to animate a flag and import it into Away3D.  I already made an animated flag in 3DS Max 2013 but can’t export it to AWD as there is no AWD exported for 2013 yet.  I don’t have Maya yet.

I never finished it. Maybe I should look at it again.

For a flag I would use a wave function on the vertices.
(something like this, but affecting vertices instead of blocks);
http://www.allforthecode.co.uk/aftc/forum/user/modules/forum/article.php?index=7&subindex=17&aid=241

Good Luck!

Yeah I was kind of hoping to import an animation instead of doing the animation through AS3.  But I could do a waterMethod just rotate the plane on the z axis and make it double sided.  I’ll try that.

My idea of using a waterMethod on a plane for a flag was a flop.  It looks horrible.  I’d really like to export from a 3DS Max vertex animation to an AWD2.

The problem I had with Havok animations from Max, was getting them to loop. I only have MAX 9, maybe they fixed this?