http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/05

Yep, depth of field. It's the effect we get with real life cameras where a Z range from the camera view gets focused and the rest gets blurred. I wanted to implement a little trick for achieving the effect with PV3D for a while, so, what can you do if you're sick and you can't sleep? :)

!!! Warning: The effect is done in a brute force !!! It generates 200 different images of the same bitmap and changing the planes textures based on the Z to the camera. If this needed to be used for a real website tricks for optimising the amount of images should be introduced.

Here it's another test with it:



http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/04


UPDATE:
And if that wasn't enough... another test ;)



http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/06


Also, as usual, source files available:
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/04/dof04.fla
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/05/dof05.fla
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/dof/06/dof06.fla

Enjoy!

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Well, not the brand (?), but the brain ;) I've been freelancing for them at their offices for a while now, so it was about time to join them.

Fun-cool projects, passionate-friendly-talented coworkers & realistic timeframes is all you need.

I'll keep updating all this tho, nothing changes, but If you want me to work on any big project contact Hi-ReS! instead ;)

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I've always been a fan of Kenta Cho's "little" and abstract games. Specially Torus Trooper and Mu-cade ones. And what was my surprise when I saw that the new one has been done with Actionscript 3.

Least Best Room (How to play video)

And if that wasn't enough for you, the sources are also available (APE libs used for the physics).

Have fun!

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This means A LOT of good things and new possibilities. Specially for xplsv.tv as the fact that VP6 is really expensive was stopping us in some new features we were implementing.

Thanks god! You can't imagine how happy this move make us... thanks Adobe! Bye bye ON2!

Technical details here.

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For a project I'm working on, I decided to try this 3dsMax exporter, mainly thinking in the filesize. Yeah, that's the most interesting thing on using the mesh data like this, if you export as .ASE the filesize of it will be quite huge with a lot of information that you don't need, then you need to include the classes for parsing the ASE data... The same applies to Collada. Just as an example, the same mesh takes 200kb in .ASE, and 130kb in .DAE. However, exporting the mesh to a class, including it in the code, and exporting the .swf , the mesh data ended up in 50kb (PV3D is more or less 30kb in the .swf, and my file was 80kb when compiled).

The only downside is that the data is inside the .swf, which isn't good if you have a lot of 3D data to load. In that case you may want to consider using the Fzip classes to compress the .DAE or .ASE, or maybe take a look at the .3DS parsing classes too.

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Lodma contacted me some months ago looking for a light weight, multi-language web system done with simple and easy to understand (so, avoid classes) actionscript  for developing a website for Adega Coop. And after the usual fights between the coder and the designer we ended up with a system we were happy with.

So my part was done, and since then Lodma has been working on the design/content on the site, and dealing with the client... until today. This is the end result:

http://www.adegaborba.pt/

Ah.. a shame I didn't know SWFAddress back then! :(

Good work Paulo!

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I needed to convert a couple of .PNGs to .SWFs for a project today. I did a quick search and I wasn't able to find something easy to use for this, and the ones I found usually just embedded the .PNG in the .SWF, which is exactly what I didn't want.

At the time of publishing a flash project with .PNG images, if you set the images on your library to be compressed to .JPG, if there is any PNG with alpha channel, flash will save the color information with JPEG compression and leave the transparency information with PNG lossless compression.

The end result it's like having a JPEG with Alpha channel, which, actually, it's something you can only have in Flash (compared to html).

Seems like the easiest way to handle the issue was creating a .JSFL file to automatise all this. I never had to do a .JSFL script before, so forgive me if I did something bad on it.

Anyway, in case you ever need it, here you have:

png2swf.jsfl
(Flash IDE script, Run it from Commands)

Enjoy!

PS: The files that I had to compress went from 4mb in total to 900kb :)

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Well, those guys have been busy for months since I did the first re-designs for the site. Yes, it was me ;) Mainly I set the overall style, icon styles, layouts, IA and a bit of UE reseach... and then Antti did the real hard work and continued everything from there.

One of the most important things in this new version is something that Andre Michelle have been working on for months now, the new sequencer.

And well, these are the big news for today, I got the feeling the project is going to be quite successful, and, although the new sequencer its a bit glitchy, as soon as everyone gets moving to the new CPU's it all will work much better (or Adobe makes the player even faster :D).

http://www.splicemusic.com/

Enjoy!

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I'm developing a site that is giving me some issues and for some reasons I can't test the compiled swf inside flash, the only way to test it is in Firefox (well, or any browser). That means that I don't have trace() there.

Well, after trying to solve the issue blindfolded I decided to do a quick search and I found this nice Add-on for Firefox that lets you see the trace() output inside Firefox :)

Thanks Sephiroth (once again!).

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Seems like the previous post inspired a bit Papervision3D developers to optimise the code a bit and get some performace boost. Ralph posted yesterday a zip file with 2 .swf (pre-optimisations and post-optimisations). It seems like, they have achieved a 40% increase of speed. It's a bit tricky tho, as soon as you reach the number of polys you then depend once again of Flash raster (aka beginBitmapFill), however, with multicore CPUs the improvements gets more clear (and also with lowpoly scenes).

After doing this, Ralph did another benchmark using the pink ball this time, as a joke he added a new value on the report: the doobies. Haha, well, the more you get, the more you can presume about your CPU ;)

Doobie Bench - RC1 version (Old)
Doobie Bench - RC11 version (Old)

So... Here are my results:

Intel core2quad 2.40GHz (My fastest CPU)

RC1:
Time: 12429ms, FPS: 29, PV3D: 4981ms, Other: 7448ms, Doobies: 46598

RC11:
Time: 10419ms, FPS: 35, PV3D: 3090ms, Other: 7329ms, Doobies: 55587

PowerPC G4 1.33GHz (er... My slowest CPU)

RC1:
Time: 76717ms, FPS: 5, PV3D: 21606ms, Other: 55111ms, Doobies: 7549

RC11:
Time: 65324ms, FPS: 6, PV3D: 12307ms, Other: 53017ms, Doobies: 8866

55587 Doobies!! beat that! ;)

PS: Doobies = Poligons drawn per second.

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