Arno Manders

Just some fun with Away3D and the SoundMixer class.

View example

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There are a growing number of posts about the technique to distort an image with the drawTriangles() function. But most of those examples create a lot of extra vertices that aren’t needed for displaying the image and more calculation means more CPU consumption. I explain here how to work with verticals and show some basic examples.

Basics

Look at this example:

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Not so long ago I saw a nice menu from (I’m not really sure) a game console on TV. It had a tilted view on 3D planes with information from a games and after selecting a plane the plane rotate toward the camera so you could see more detail from the selected game. I made something like that with flickr pictures. You can navigate by using the arrow keys. For now I limited the search result to 29 pictures to prevent a crash from the browser.

Visit flickr photo viewer  (warning CPU heavy)

I had the idea to make it so you can browse infinite  through the photos but sadly that is getting to heavy for the CPU.  In the future I will try other effects (for example create the tiles only in one direction) to achieve the infinite browsing idea.

A few weeks ago I was busy finding a graduate project. And during that time augmented reality looked very interesting. Most of you know what it means, for the others here a small explaining line from wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.

"it's amazing, it's the new Lego"

I’m not going deeper into this subject I only made this post to show some of the cool examples:

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Here in Holland you have free news papers that you can read when you consume any kind of  public transportation.  In my childhood when I was bored I took a newspaper and draw all sorts of objects on  photo’s of famous people,  like: glasses, moustaches, beards and acme. I think this is also cool in flash

My original idea was to do it different than the newspaper and use 3D for it. Put a famous head as texture on a 3D model and draw on it. I’m not that far yet because it is hard to find an 3D model of a head. I now have an 3D plane with a texture on it. It is already possible to do the same things as in the newspaper and something more… You can save it to a server! So I encourage you to upload your creation to a server.

For now I have a photo from Berlusconi (Italian prime minister). Why? Because I love his quote on the recent earthquake victims that lost there home

“They have everything they need, they have medical care, hot food . . . Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary, but they should see it like a weekend of camping.”

Please upload those drawings and I will show them on my blog!!!!

start drawing

I hope I don’t get problems with the mafia

Known problems: Slow and you see some grey dots if you move the mouse (don’t know the solution)

I extended the Flex 3D example of my previous post some more. Now you can drag (left mousebutton) the objects and bounce them into each other.

I think the smart visiters will see that it look a little like TileUI from Doug McCune or TileUI copy of Bill White. I tried to make something like that but I used Away3D and the WOW physics engine.

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Watch the Away3D and WOW demo. Sometimes they stand like a tower and sometimes it almost look like they explode. Click on the onderground to reset the cubes to a random position

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While I was building my ImageViewer3D I noticed a few things that can make everything just a little bit faster. And for the challenge and for fun I made a sort of testing application. I build it with Flex and Away3D

You can change the a few things such as the amount of 3d objects, type of filter, zoom of the camera and you can see how much this effects the framerate. After every change I reset the average FPS (frames per second) to give the best indication what the effect of the new options will have on the average FPS.
Probably this test is not really reflecting how much faces Away3D can render. A lot of things I do can be done more efficient. The source is enabled

preformance test

Some other preformance tips

I couldn’t build everything in because of the lack of time and also this project would be to big to be fun. Some other things that you can do to get the preformance up.

• No precision on materials
• No smoothing for materials or turn the smoothing on when it is needed
• Niels Bruin told me this one: Set the application framerate to 60
• Make sure that now 3D objects are in each other
• This trick is from Maikel Sibbal: Only render if there is really something changed
• 3D Objects close to the camera slows down the fps

Today I’m going to release the code of ImageViewer3D like I promised before. It is not finished but I have to move on to other things. I few days ago I asked everyone to give input and because of the shortage of time I can’t put every suggestion in. Sorry for that but many thanks for the comments. On the bottom of this article you can find the download urls. To make this component I used Away3D as 3D engine and Tweener for the tweens.

Features

A few features of the ImageViewer

• Slideshow
• Flickr search
• XML picture load
• Multipage option

Example Application
Example with Flickr

Download example code so you can see how to use this component. I also used the as3 Flickr Library for this example.

Simple Application

Simple example

Download simple ImageViewer3D

Everyone can use the simple application. Just put the” imageviewer3d.swf” and the folder “assets” with the xml file on your server (you can’t run it local) . For the Simple ImageViewer3D you have to make sure that the photos.xml is located at the folder “/assets/xml/photos.xml”

Component

Download component

For example you can add xmlns:imageviewer3d="imageviewer3d.*" inside the application tag and add this between the application tags

Feel free to modify this component

If you find bugs our just errors please report it in the comments.

NOTE: This component isn’t working in IE6, Fireworks is expired so I will post a picture of the application later

I recently discovered Away3D, the 3D engine for Flex and Flash. I’m now working for 3 weeks with this 3D engine and it is easy to consume. I started with some spheres and cubes to get use to the 3D concept. After I got bored I started a real project. For now I call that project “ImageViewer3D ” (because I couldn’t think of anything better).

My concept is inspired by the tiltViewer from www.airtightinteractive.com. He made it in Flash but it isn’t opensource so I couldn’t use his code.

Things I try to archive before I think I’m done:

• Inserting your own Array of photos (XML or component)
• Do something with the next- and previouspage button
• Tweak or perhaps maybe change some effects
• If the photos of a page are in the browser cache they all appear at the same time what causing the browser to run slow at that moment
• If the height of a photo is larger than the width the border is thicker
• etc… (more things that I forget)

ImageViewer3D v1

I try to make a nice tool so every opinion is welcome. Positive or negative I don’t care. What effect is cool and what effect isn’t? What should be tweaked? Also feed me with new features.

UPDATE: Final release can be found here.