collection of papervision 3D tutorials

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!

This tutorial continues our series “Papervision For Beginners”. Please note that it follows on from tutorial Basic Template Usage and if you haven’t read that post, you’d better do so. This time the author shows how to give a spinning cone a texture by modifying a few lines in the code from the previous article. You will use a BitmapFileMaterial for this. The source code is well commented and easy to understand.

For all of Papervision’s technical brilliance, there is one major factor that prevents it being used in more Flash applications: it’s complicated. You need a good understanding of ActionScript, 3D concepts and some fairly low level resource loading and handling techniques in order to use Papervision.

Fortunately Flash has introduced the concept of components, which allows you to create a UI element that can be dropped onto a Flash application and edited just like you would a button or a combo box. It removed the need to know anything about ActionScript because all the properties can be accessed and modified by the graphical editor. This tutorial covers some aspects of creating a Papervision component. It provides a simple demo, source code and some links that might come in handy.

There are a few physics engines available for Flash (WOW and APE), but they seem to be quite basic or limited to 2D. In this article from our collection of Papervision tutorials the author uses a Java physics engine called Traer to create an impressive physics demonstration. And so one Java decompiler and a few hours of work ended with a nice cloth simulation example. Just click on the demo and you’ll move one of the corners of the sheet. It is a pretty cool example of what is possible with Papervision and the Flash platform in general.

A Flex / Actionscript development tutorial that shows you how to use the Papervision 3D egine to create 3D Flash effects in your webpage. This article looks at the various shading techniques available in Papervision 3D.

Shading is a technique used to highlight a 3D model against a light source. Papervision 3D supports a number of shading methods, 4 of which will be demonstrated in this post. Don’t forget to view demo and download the source code.

How often do you want to move an object by some predefined amount over a certain period of time? Like “move to this point in 2 seconds”. This sort of movement over a timescale is the cornerstone of animation and scripting. Unfortunately to implement this in code is quite tedious. You first need to work out how fast you should be moving, and then keep track of how long you have actually moved. It’s not hard, but it does require writing a lot of boring code.
Fortunately there is a very elegant solution for this sort of animation. The Tweener library allows you to modify the properties of an object over a certain period of time with one or two lines of code. Learn how to use this technique in this tutorial. Demo and source code are attached as always.

Read this article to learn how to create a number of individual planes, each one textured with a small section of an embedded image. Each column of the overall image sequentially decomposes into its individual planes and flies off the side of the screen. The actual movement is handled by the Tweener class and after a while the whole process repeats itself. As always, the demo and the source code are included.

In this tutorial you can learn how to build a controlled lightsaber using WiiFlash and Papervision3D. Your goal will be to learn how to use a wiimote within flash and how to combine it with papervision3D. Afterwards, of course, you can use this app to train for your Jedi mastership. The article includes multiple screenshot and code explanations, it’s pretty easy to read. The source code is availabl for downloading as well.

Here’s the tutorial about how to create a 3d spectrum display from a sound file with Papervision3d and Flash. For this demo application, you will use the latest version of Papervision3d with the code name GreatWhite.
You need to include 7 Papervision classes to begin. The Camera3D class enables you to focus on a 3d object and zoom to it. Scene3D is a container that holds all 3d objects. The Viewport will be added to the main stage and is like a video screen that shows the result. Another important class is the BasicRenderEngine which renders all the objects from the scene with the current camera settings and outputs the result to the viewport. Papervision comes with different types of objects, but for our example you’ll only need the cube. And finally there are the materials which can be set to the objects.
As always, the article provides demo and fully commented source code.

The depth of filed effect can be seen in a lot in landscape photographs where an object in the foreground (say a tree) is in focus while the background (like some mountains) will be quite blurry. It’s not an effect that is naturally reproduced with 3D engines – typically the entire scene is rendered in focus with no regard for a depth of field.

However it is a fairly easy effect to achieve with Papervision and the standard Flash effects. Read this tutorial to learn how to apply depth of field to your Papervision model. In the demo you can modify the focal point of the camera using the slider on the left hand side. The source code is provided as well.