Papervision

Papervision is the 3D engine I’ve been working on during the past months.

It started as a simple way to transform MovieClips to achieve the 3D illusion. By changing their position, size, rotation and skew you could almost forgive the lack of perspective.

But the latest version, fully optimised for Flash 8 Image API, uses triangle tesselation to distort textures. Now we can render complex objects in “real 3D”!

Constant benchmarking and understanding the player’s strengths and limitations are essential to getting the best performance. I’ve also learned a lot from using it in real projects. Most of the features have been added to solve problems found during production.

[Update: Papervision goes open souce]

[Much more info: blog.papervision3d.org]

Version 4
October 2006, Flash 8

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Version 3
June 2006, Flash 8

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Version 2
April 2006, Flash 7

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Version 1
March 2006, Flash 7

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Version 0.9 Beta
December 2005, Flash 7

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

I started playing with 3D on the Atari ST and later on the Amiga. Made a living out of it when moved into PlayStation development, but almost forgot it all when I switched to web design.

But time has passed by and Flash has improved greatly. With higher processing power and much faster screen rendering, it’s now possible to get really nice results.

And most of the techniques that were used during the early days of realtime 3D graphics, are now valid again.

At least, until we have 3D hardware support.