collection of papervision 3D tutorials

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!

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.