Results tagged “Papervision3D” from Swell 3D

I don't want to overuse words like "awesome," lest they lose their force. Things that are merely admirable should not be called awesome; only those things that inspire wonder and dread for their great beauty and genius merit this description. So, you should understand how serious a remark it is, when I say this site is awesome.

Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean are multimedia designers in Amsterdam. Their newly launched portfolio website, www.barcinski-jeanjean.com, uses anaglyphic 3-D navigation to display the samples of their impressive work.

The designers themselves are standing in a panoramic view of Amsterdam (which you can rotate 360 degrees by moving your cursor over the arrows to the left and right). Their portfolio samples are represented as paper sheets hovering in a ring around them, as though they were emanating from the artists' minds.

Upon entering, you have the option of playing a little 3-D ping-pong game while the site loads. Even the little game is cool! If it were a stand-alone game rather than a pre-loader, I would still be writing about it: simple and fun, excellent use of 3-D physics.

The blog entry about the site explains how they built it in Adobe Flash with Actionscript 3 and the Papervision3D engine. It will be relatively easy to modify their portfolio in the future, since the data and images are loaded with external XML, so we may look forward to updates.

This is pretty cool. Move your mouse around these playing cards:

I had tried using Papervision3D to make an anaglyph in experiment 04. Well, I learned from that effort, and now I am doing it again, only better. This time, I used Ben Stucki's StereoMovieScene3D class. Thanks, Ben.

Do you like those beautiful Ace playing card designs? Those are from my Indian-themed free online Flash game Dashabooja. It's like poker, but with ten hands.

I thought I should try Papervision3D, an open-source ActionScript 3D engine, to see if I could use it for anaglyphic animations and games and such. So I downloaded it, and did their "Rotate" example, then turned it into an anaglyph:

I got it to work, but not how I hoped. I was hoping to have two cameras in the scene, a left and a right, looking at the same objects, and apply some kind of color filter to each camera, red for one, cyan for the other. Then, render both the cameras.

But it didn't work that way. I could put two cameras in the same scene, but I couldn't render them both. If I tried, only the second one actually rendered.

And so, to make this anaglyph, I actually had to have duplicates of everything. Not just two cameras, but two containers, two scenes, and two rotating squares too (since I couldn't register the same square with both scenes). It doesn't seem efficient, and it's almost exactly the opposite of my original goal, which was to create 3D effects one symbol at a time. So, Papervision3D might not be for me.

On the other hand, some other developers have managed to do very nice anaglyphs with Papervision3D. For example this works very well [1]. And this is quite good (be sure to turn "STEREO 3D: ON," in the lower right corner) [2]. And so is this [3].It is possible that they have hit upon something that I haven't found yet. So I won't totally write PV3D off yet, until I know more.

FOOTNOTES:
[1]: Ben Stucki (Ben Stucki did post his source code, but I think it's for Flex instead of Flash.)
[2]: Barcinski and Jeanjean
[3]: Mr. Doob