Recently I had been doing a little more work in Away3D and I needed to use an object that was more complex than a preset primitive. After looking through some of the Away3D examples I tried bringing in my own model from Cinema4D. I quickly found that setting up and exporting your file correctly is half the battle. In this tutorial I’ll explain how to create a primitive in cinema4D export it correctly for Away3D inside flash. Source code is available at the bottom. Use the right/left arrows to switch models and the up/down to change the texture. Below is the final product:
source code is available HERE
Recently I decided to tackle a challenge posed by Firstborn in New York on behalf of the Society of Digital Agencies to students at RIT . The challenge: was to animate type completely with Actionscript 3.0. This text had to be loaded and configured using XML, and XML only. Having previously done a text explosion effect in papervision3D I knew that I wanted to do something a little different. I finally decided on everyone’s favorite thing about New Zealand- no not Lord of the Rings. Flight of the Conchords! Being the tech geek that I am their song “Robots” seemed perfect for this assignment, plus it was only two minutes long.
Source Code is available here
Recently I had been wanting to do some more interactive 3D type of projects. I wanted to create something beyond just a pre-rendered sequence that simulated camera movement. I have previously been using papervision3D but wanted to expand my knowledge and check out the competition. Papervision X has been long expected but with Ralph Hauwert Unit Zero One leaving the team I thought it was time to move on. Away3D was very highly recommended by my colleague Kyle Beikirch for it’s more frequent updates to SVN and ease of interactivity. Since I was exactly sure what would be interactive when I started: I gave it a shot.
I was reading Lee Brimelow’s Blog ( http://gotoandlearn.com/play?id=63 ) and was having some fun playing with effects. While I was trying out a few different solutions to see what the effect would be. The problem was having to continuously recompile my flash movie to see the changed effect. A few numeric steppers later I was able to make a this little applications that spits out the colorMatrix Filter code.
Infinite Puddle:
I was in the lab yesterday and saw my friend animating text and 3D and it did not seem very appetizing. I really regret having to do tedious time-consuming things by hand. If there is ever a procedural way to generate or simulate something I’m willing to try. So I put together this little example.
*UPDATE*
I was able to get the zDepth working by applying simple blur filters to the bitmaps of the BitmapMaterials inside papervision3D. I also added in an input text field so that users could change the text without having to recompile. I have some bigger ideas for this down the road, like sequencing camera tweens between each letter. And exploding a whole paragraph word for word. I had some trouble with making the letter interactive, but it’s always been a bit of a pain to get events working with papervision3D. But for now: I’m happy where it is. The code is extremely well documented and if you have any questions just shoot me a line at : ben.mcchesney@gmail.com
The update source code is located here
Outdoor Panoramic scene where the user collects samples
Over the last 5 weeks I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Designer I have also had tremendous respect for : Kevin Whitefield ( site is located at : virtualmatter.org ) . Our goal was to create an online experience that that was truly immersive. We used flash technology and create several scenes the user could navigate and interact with very similar to Quicktime’s QTVR technology.
At first we toyed with the idea of using papervision3D but realized that it was not as feasible as we first thought, even though projected environments on spheres did correct a lot of the distortion problems caused by large panoramic images.
This project was also a great opportunity to create complex soundscapes which I had a blast creating, and was thankful I allocated enough time to do it well.
So there’s this thing on the internet right? And it’s called Gaia Framework, and it’s awesome.
I could always develop individual swfs, and do little test experiments but when it came to making entire sites, I always seemed to fall short with navigation, garbage collection, and good coding practices just to get it to work. But using Gaia, I am able to correct all these problems, and build full websites *easily*. I noticed that a lot of other students also struggled with the development of entire site, and thought I could help by offering up what I learned, and the site that I created.
For the piece I really wanted to utilize dynamic information to power a flash application. After researching I came across several API’s for actiosncript 3.o and after polling a number of people found that last.fm’s API would appeal to the largest target audience.
I put some time aside to render out a bee to be used for my bitmap world in AS3. Even though the bee will only end up being 50×50 pixels, but it never hurts to go over kill and render out big models to show off. Later for the final I ended up using a small .gif sequence of the bee slowly rotating in 3d space to give an extra sense of depth.
That's one sweet bee.
The goal of this piece was to create a timeline. After venturing on the internets for a while I noticed a trend: most timelines are really boring. Most timelines consisted of poorly designed shells that have a simple side scrolling bar with dates and events. I wanted to create a more engaging user experience and was heavily influenced by the Halo 3 Believe website. Instead of conveying a series of events, I wanted to recreate a moment in time and allow the user to explore the environment.