jin_u as blog

Alternativa3D 5.0 (Milestone 1)

• Signals system — only nesessary calculations;
• BSP — quality polygon sorting, “sharp” crossings;
• n-gons support;
• reusing layers (only changed regions redrawing, polygons are independent);
• objects hierarchy;
• only necessary matrix, coords and UVs recalculating;
• perspective correction — dynamic triangulation;
• collision detection.

new features::

• dynamic lighting and shadows (точечные и направленные источники света);
• bump lighting;
• parallax mapping;
• automatic UV-mapping;
• sprites, 3D-sprites;
• sprite lighting;
• texture objects;
• Global Illumination imitation;
• sprite pre-render system (phases render on server using uploaded 3D-models);
• animation system (including inverse kinematics);
• 3D-objects interactivity;
• physics simulation.

Really, you have never seen this kind of realtime 3D in flash before. And it's all made possible by PaperVision3D. Some time ago I have joined the Papervision core team, (Carlos Ulloa (Founder), and John Grden), but silently since I had nothing to commit yet. Ever since I joined there was one primary focus, and that was : Materials. In it's current revision papervision has no shading, and 3 materials. What I set out to do was to try and make PV3D more realistic, be a bit faster, and have some easy to use Materials in there.

Since we started Carlos and me have been coding away to be able to implement new Materials, and getting stuff cleaned up afterwards. Today we had planned a demo of some of the new materials. Due to business with other things the last weeks, I didn't really get there yet, but instead did a whole new material tonight. And I just have to post it. 3D Bumpmapping. This is first version I have of bumpmapping, and when I finally got to run, a warm feeling of happiness took hold of me. It's there. It's working....

3D Bumpmapping sphere with earth texture:

3D Bumpmapping rhino, with the same texture, just to show, no tricks.

(both might take some time to load, be patient, and make sure you have Flash 9).

The great thing about this kind of bumpmapping is that we can now partially support normal mapping (we can not support DOT3, yet). This trick, widely used, is applied to a low poly count object (like pv3d can handle), to make it look like a thousands of poly object. Since the bumpmapping has a constant cpu cost, this could mean a whole new level of 3d in Flash.
Read this article on normal mapping at wikipedia.. Unfortunatly, the examples above do not employ the trick, but I'm hoping for someone to supply me with a model, texturemap and normalmap soon! ;-)

Bumpmapping is only one of the new materials, there are more to come; expect more demo's soon. The idea is also to support light and material setups straight out of collada; you go into your favorite 3d package of choice, export collada, and import it by just loading it. We are hoping to get all this done before going out of beta.
This is just a preliminary version, so some things are wrong : the environmentmap isn't cubic. We have cubic environment maps, but I couldn't get them to work with this yet. So the reflection follows the camera at the moment, it's the best I could do on a short notice. We will get this in the new revision of PaperVision3D as soon as we have it all cleaned up. In that revision there will be a whole lot more material goodness.

If you want more info on this or have models, mail me at ralph@unitzeroone.com. Papervision is here:Papervision3d, be sure to join the mailing list.

To make this thing even more epic I'll do some credits
Thanks to the following people, who helped getting this done:
Carlos Ulloa : Always kind to take some time to help think, or change something, coding, PV3D Founder, and the one good enough to make it opensource.
John Grden: Technical and moral support!
Mr.Doob: Putting my mindset back on the right track.
Jim (blackpawn) Scott : RGB info on normal maps.