After straight segments extrusion it was time to play with the rounded stuff.
This Lathe class allows you to rotate 2 or more 3D points arround the axis of your choice or using an offset if needed, you can add more rotations in order to generate springs, phonecords or screws… and like the segment extrude class it supports multiple textures and you can add thickness to the geometry as well. Very handy to show some exploded views of parts, educational stuff… or some melons!

This little technical demo shows the most common use of the class. Press on the model to change the points randomly.

For this one: Lathe+tweek properties+md2 generator = 30 sec work!

If you wonder why there are no forks or spoons in the situation demo, that’s because I wanted to use exclusively the Lathe class to build it!

All the objects you see here are just generated with one line of code and an array of Number3D’s.

Of course, the idea is to use other forms, models, primitives but…. I just couldn’t resist!

More extrudes classes are coming…

PS: Jerome, it was too late to couple it with WoW, will try it in next one!

Note: For some weird reasons, these demo’s will play only with the latest player installed on your machine. (9,0,115,0). As soon as I’ve figured out why, I’ll update them.

In order to build a complex scenery and keep it low poly, you need to have good 3D skills and a good modeller. For many that’s just too much to ask. As a result, I read threads everyday, on lists and forums, on how to load those elephant xml files…

I think it’s just bad practice to build whole scenes that way, specially when it comes to Flash.
And here comes the problem:
What else?

Personally I think that’s one the biggest challenges, offering tools that helps to reduce loading problems and offer more flexibility to the way we work.

So here’s my first contribution in that direction, this demo shows one of the classes I’m working on.
The class allows you to create extrudes from points, like a fence around a house, walls, a city block, charts elevation, some surrounding forest, sky trips or … a maze! You can define elevation on 3 axis, thickness, add one or more materials per segments, be able to generate one mesh from one or more point definitions, subdivisions per segments so you can control the polygon count, be able to decide if texture(s) covers whole geometry or per segments, you can hide some sides…
Last but not least, this option costed me almost a total rewrite of the class: it respects the thickness no matter the angle of the next segment.

Here is a 2d representation of the algorithm.

Of course one class is not enough… so more are coming!

To bring in 2008, it is time for an update to the documentation for Away3D.

Other than a significant makeover, the documentation now :

• has been updated to V1.9.2
• provides a search function
• documetation can be easily managed
• links to the new wiki are included for each class
• examples will be included with the classes to make life easier
• anyone can add comments to the documentation

At present, there is still a lot of content to be added to the documentation but this is now a simple process and can be done when required - rather than having to get comments put in the code and get it all regenerated. So more information will be being added all the time - if you need to know something in particular, contact us on the mailing list.

In conjuntion with the new LIVEDOCS, Pete has done a great job and introduced an EXAMPLES page to allow anyone to post any useful Away3D snippets or complete solutions that others would benfit from. Note, these will be subject to approval by the team.

And if that wasn’t enough, there is now a site WIKI to provide yet another mechanism for use contribution. There is a link from each class in the Livedocs to a class specific wiki page. If the page doesn’t exist, create it and add to it. This again is to allow all of you to help others understand and use the API.

If you come across any issues with the livedocs, examples or wiki, let me know via the mailing list and I’ll get it seen to as soon as I can.

NOTE: Please bear in mind that these items may need tweaking and will certainly have more information added and should be considered to be in a Work-In-Progress state. More notices will be posted when things of significance happen.

Greg

In order to animate in Flash3D you need to use pretty advanced 3D tools to generate and export animation data. For many it’s just a bridge too far.
And even for the professionals, it often cost too much development time. And because of this, many choose not to animate at all. I think that’s a shame.

During the last weeks I’ve worked on many new features for Away’s native animation system, and together with other team mates have spend lots of time looking at ways to ensure easyness of use for the pro user as for the starter.

I’ve tried here to build in a few of those handy features in this demo:

- Path animation system. Both the camera are on a path in this case.
- The animated hummingbird is animated automatically by Away’s animation system, (as you will see bellow with the cube example, it’s very easy to accomplish the same thing natively now).
- Target following: The camera follows the bird according to its position.
- AlignToPath: Both camera is automatically oriented as it moves on the path.
- And of course the tiling feature in action.

Note that this demo is not using Away’s 1.9 but my good old workhorse dev version of the engine, so expect about 30-35% more speed with the 1.9.x and higher! Why? Simply because we haven’t ported the tiling in the latest version yet!

And of course i want to thank Peter Kapelyan for the HB model, Meowza for the bird texture and not to forget the beautifull music done by Atom(bang)

Here a little demo that shows how the bird is being animated. In this case i use cubes, just to show you how easy this is. Just click the cube to see it.

private function makeBoxeAnimation():void
{
var mat:IMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(myBitmadata, {});

var cube = new Cube({width:350, height:350, depth:350});
var cube2 = new Cube({width:500, height:50, depth:250});
var cube3 = new Cube({width:150, height:450, depth:50});
var cube4 = new Cube({width:650, height:250, depth:550});

_anim = new Animator(cube, [{vertices:cube2.vertices, prefix:”cube01″},
{vertices:cube3.vertices, prefix:”cube02″},
{vertices:cube4.vertices, prefix:”cube03″},
{vertices:cube2.vertices, prefix:”cube04″}] ,
{material:mat, y:0, x:0,z:0,bothsides:false});
this.scene.addChild(_anim);

_anim.play({prefix:”cube”, smooth:true, loop:true, fps:.5});

//let the fun begin
stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, this.refreshScreen);
}

private function refreshScreen(event:Event):void
{
_anim.rotationX += .5;
_anim.rotationY += 1.5;
_anim.rotationZ += .5;
this.view.scene.updateTime();
this.view.render();
}

Fabrice

Gosh,

I never knew coding can be fun! Of course I am interested in making games, so I needed some smoke and particles. I made my last demo ALOT better, but because I spent like 1 week staring at it (yes time wasted), instead of coding- just staring! I have concluded that making games in Away3d is not only fun, but addictive :)

So here is a better example of Depth of Field, Filters, Blendmode (the smoke), a Constant Emitter (the smoke), and even some cool TIME-STOP feature so you get to catch all that goodness, and get to see the correct Z sorting between the particles. Ok now that I can breathe after that last sentence- click away! and have fun :)

Please leave a comment, I will appreciate it!

One of the things I was missing the most in the API was the ability to tile the textures. This allows you to repeat an image on a model with no overlaps and no gaps. The best illusion can be of course achieved by using a seamless image.
Sea surface, deserts, endless roads etc… As you will discover in this demo, it looks like infinite planes are coming to Flash.

Making a material with tiling properties is pretty easy too:
var mat:IMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(myBitmapdata,{ repeatH:2, repeatW:2});

I’m already curious to see what will be done with this new feature!

Fabrice

This shows Away3D version 1.9 in action with REALTIME filters (blurring) on each object.
Make sure you get the latest version, which has the ownCanvas property.

This feature is pretty awesome, so check out what I made!

Click to make an explosion!

BlendMode Version!

This demo nicely illustrates the huge visual enhancement that normalmapping brings to Away3D. You can click on the bust to swap between the new Dot3BimapMaterial and the old WhiteShadingBitmapMaterial to compare. New materials that take advantage of normal maps will be included in the next release of Away3D.

The normal map in this example was created from a high-poly mesh using a technique decribed here. The resulting model has significantly fewer triangles, but retains a high degree of detail in the displayed object. This is hugely beneficial to scenes where high render speeds require low poly-models.

Rob

Broken link, file corrupted etc… we all have experienced those things…

In Away3D there is a native export to AS3, you can export any model loaded in your project to the AS3 format: .as. This allows you to compile the final version of your work in Flash without using the original model(s). Not only making the loading procedures easier, it also provides a better way to protect the 3D models from being reused once published.

Away3D supports MD2 natively too, and it was already possible to export MD2 like any other supported formats, but not yet possible to export the animation data to AS3. Until now !

The little demo shown here displays an .obj file (the flowers) and an animated MD2 model (the Hummingbird) converted to an AS3 class. The original models were needed just to set up the scale into scenery, then both files were exported as .as files and compiled with the rest of the code. This gives us a nice extra for free: colored declarations in our code eg. new Flower() or new Bird();. The concept “beauty of code” takes a new dimension! Soon some Flash code poetry contests?

I’ve also extended the export option to a fixed decimal count. If you take a look at 3D data, especially when the original model is being rescaled on screen, you often get numbers with more than 10 decimals for all vertex definitions… so one little boolean set allows you to save more than 50% of the .as class filesize (this was the case on the models displayed here). Depending of course on the amount of polygons, the more polygons, the more the ‘compression’ becomes obvious. At max fixed 4 decimals I couldn’t find any problems on renderings. If a particular case generates an ugly artifact, just don’t set the boolean!

Shown in this demo too, the latest version of the enviroMaterial code. Even smoother!

This exporter will be release in Away3D 2.0.

Fabrice

First ever implementation of dot3 normal mapping in Flash

There is a lot of possibility with importing normal maps into away3d. However, normal maps themselves can be complex to get right, so this demo combines the advantages of a normal map render pipe with the simplicity of a bumpmapped texture, allowing the model to have extra detail without all that fiddly high-poly/low-poly nonsense. Much easier to get right, plus you have the advantage of using a normal map if you would prefer. People with faster machines can set the default quality to high for a fantastic smoothed shading experience… - looks great but it’s also heavy on the old processor.

I cannot tell you how soon i want to try this with a proper normal map…

Rob