collection of papervision 3D tutorials

Today we’ll speak about web page designs that сan take your website to the next level. We’ll focus on PaperVision 3D Templates, to be exact.

PaperVision 3D Templates are Flash templates based on ActionScript 3 and made with the PaperVision 3D engine. You may ask yourself, what makes PaperVision 3D Templates so special? These templates come with amazing functionality brought by ActionScript 3 and look very attractive and stylish as they’ve been built with PaperVision 3D. To make sure of it, please scroll down. Note each image is linked to a live demo that will surely fascinate you.

PaperVision 3D Template #1

This is a great video tutorial from Lee Brimelow which gives you some basics of how to get started with a kind of trendy thing today called augmented reality. By nature, the augmented reality is an ActionScript library used in conjunction with Papervision3D to map 3D objects onto the printed patterns patterns put before a web camera. By means of this tutorials you will learn the basic prinsipals of how to achieve this effect.

This tutorial shows you how to use Papervision3D 2.0 to create an interactive cube navigator. The material is performed in video format, so it could be easier for you to understand the whole process. The author provides the link to the source code as well.

See this tutorial to get a basic idea of how you can use the Papervision MeshUtil.cutTriangleMesh function to split a mesh into two parts. Demo and source code are included.

One of the easiest ways to generate the look of this outside world is a sky box. Essentially it is a box that contains the player (or more specifically the camera). If you move the box so its position is always centred on the camera, and make it large enough to encompass the 3D world that the player is looking at, the player gets the effect of a distant vista that surrounds their local 3D world. This tutorial informs you about how to work with the SkyBox effect.

The following sample takes a standard Papervision cube primitive, textures it with 6 double sided skybox textures (double sided so we can see the textures from the inside), and updates the position of the cube so it is always centred on the camera. Though the camera never actually moves in the demo, the author has included the code anyway. Demo is available for viewing as well.

A common problem with a software 3D rendering is deciding the order in which triangles are drawn. It’s important because the most distant polygons that make up the scene should be rendered before those closer to the camera. But what about polygons that intersect?

Using this Papervision 3D tutorial, you can learn how to render 3D scene with intersecting polygons. In the demo you can switch between the basic and Quadrant rendering engines by toggling the checkbox in the top left hand corner of the screen. It makes it easy to see the difference that the Quadrant rendering engine makes. You can also download the source code for further details.

For this tutorial the author used the code from the related post Papervision 3D Programming Tutorial: Explodo-logo and added the ability of image transition in a variety of different ways. Each option (selectable from the combo box in the top left of the demo screen) flips the individual planes that make up the final image  in a cascading “mexican wave” motion, either starting from a corner of the image or one of the side.

You could use this code quite easily to add a transition for your own images simply by replacing the .png files in the media directory. It could easily add some pizzazz to (a usually quite boring) photo album. 

Like the exlodo-logo example, the movement of the individual planes in this example is all handled by the Tweener library. Tweening can save you from having to write so much boring boilerplate code to manage the modification of your Actionscript objects. If you don’t know what Tweener is, check out this post here.

Papervision tutorials for beginners are continuing.  In this article you will learn how to modify the “Creating Objects” project again, this time to load a Collada Model file.

Loading Collada files is the fastest and easiest way in Papervision 3d to get a complex model into your scene. By changing a few lines in your code, you can quickly load a model of a cow and make it spin!

You’ll need to use the org.papervision3d.objects. DisplayObject3D package to store our model in. This will store the geometry, materials and everything like the position and rotation. We’ll also need the Collada file parser. The whole process is rather simple and understandable.

In this post you can find an overview of two concepts in Papervision: culling and clipping. They are easy to confuse, but both have very important roles.

Culling is the process whereby objects that are not seen by the camera are removed from the rendering pipeline, meaning less polygons for the Papervision engine to have to process.

Clipping is where polygons that extend past the camera are culled, leading to polygons that are still visible (because only part of it is past the cameras view) disappear.

Tutorial is quite informative and detailed. You can view the live demo and download the source code for better practice.

It’s rather difficult to attract the web audience to your website and make them stay longer there. Developers and designers always have to invent something new. And an animated logo certainly does catch the eye. This tutorial shows you how to create a moving 3D text logo with Papervision.

The author took the inspiration for this post from the Windows “3D Text” screensaver. From the demo you can see that this Papervision application is showing the time. However the code presented here could be easily extended to display any sort of text message, and because it is fully rendered in 3D you can move and interact with it in real time any way you want. Demo and the source code are included as always. Enjoy!