Berkeley-based Earthmine, has first unveiled their 3D mapping system to the world at the DEMOfall 2007 conference. Their vehicles take high resolution imagery whilst surveying the entire surroundings in 3D. This awesome dataset opens up a whole world of possibilities in the world of geo spatial indexing.
To unlock this data to the public, for front-end technology they chose the Flash Platform, in combination with Papervision3D. This allows them to enable anyone to access high resolution 3D datasets, and tag, navigate, measure, take pictures, and lots more.
It has been a while since we added anything about the new materials. We are getting these ready for a new, upcoming revision. While working on the engine itself, I kind of stumbled over something which looked nice, so I went ahead and made a little demo.
Here is a great example of mixing physics with Papervision3D.
Manuel Bua, a very talented software developer based in Trento (Italy), has created Magic Carpet, a carpet simulation demo powered by Alec Cove’s excellent APE physics engine.
The interactive mesh deformation is very realistic, quite fun to play with. But his attention to detail goes further, with realtime image compositing and post-processing.
I just posted the new ISM demos and docs to the FaceLevelInteractivity branch and posted a detailed entry and demo using the new face level support on Papervision3D
Make sure you try the different options because it’s quite fun to play with it. You can zoom in and out, pause and look around and even underneath, and there’s a lot of texture options. The lava is simply amazing.
After going through and putting in the latest version of the components, I realized it would be immensely helpful, to the people who couldn’t make the classes, to tell you *what* the demos are So, here’s an explanation of all:
handsOn/Developers
Demo_0
BasicSceneWithPlane: Using the new Scene3D component, we create a simple plane and add it to the scene component.
BasicSceneWithPlane_MovieAssetMaterial: All code this time, simple scene, camera, plane with a MovieAssetMaterial from the library
Demo_1
TargetCamera_orbit: It WAS a target camera, but we switched it in class to show how to use a Free camera It uses Peter Kapelyn’s trick of moving the camera back to zero, rotating on Y axis by 1 degree, then moving back out – genius. All code, no component.
TargetCamera_orbit_math: this one actually DOES use a target camera, only, the orbiting is accomplished with 2 lines of math. You’ll see that there’s a 3rd line to rotationY – just remove that. Target cam doesn’t allow rotationY calls and that line gets ignored in the Flash IDE. I just realized I forgot to remove that line in the demo files.
TargetCamera_Tweener: Uses a target camera with tweener to show you how to animate a 3D object with Tweener.
Demo_3
TargetCamera_FreeCameraFly: I really gotta work on my naming conventions. This is basically a star wars / stars / flight sim demo. Shows you how to use multiple canvas’ and multiple scene’s to create the illusion of flying through stars. All code and includes the xwing controls class.
Demo_4
FormUI: The idea was to create a form with basic button, then create planes in 3D studio max to mirror that look. Then, export a collada file, and use the plane object’s (Sprites) mouse events to control the form that’s actually off stage. I just didn’t have time to finish the implementation unfortunately.
handsOn/Designer
cubeSample
this was a demo done at the class to show how to control animation flow across the faces of a cube. We created a cube in 3D Studio Max, added a UVW unwrap modifier, then flattened the mapping. Then created a normals map to work from. We took that normals map into PhotoshopCS3 and added directional arrows. We imported the bitmap with arrows backinto 3D Studio Max and then rotated the faces of the model to match the direction of the arrows. The final result was matrix code streams being applied as a MovieAssetMaterial and the streams “flowing” in the direction of the arrows.
demo_normalMapping
Same idea as the above, but this time we wrapped the animation around the outside of an oiltank model.
3D
3dDude: This was some hi-poly model that John Olson found the night we were debugging the component
3Spheres: this is actually a baked shadows demo that I created in class. 3 balls and a plane using rendered textures with shadows.
axisBox: it’s actually a cube with a texture that has the directional arrows applied with the pivot point in the corner of the cube. It was meant to be a demo about oneSide=true on materials and how you can’t see the object from the opposing view.
Guitar: It’s the guitar from the midi demo I did. It’s a simple model showing how you can have your “parts” separated and completely accessible through code. The body, neck and stock are all separate objects.
materials/meshes: Just a couple of junk folders really. I just threw stuff in there
spheres: This was the original 3ball demo I did at home to be prepared for class. Of course, the class didn’t like pre-canned stuff. So I had to do it fresh
tieFighter: My really really simple low poly tie fighter model
Xwing: The one you’ve seen a million times.
JediTrainingSphere
this was the actual project to create the slide presentation for the class. You can fly around with a wii using the wiiFlash server, as well a move to the next slide and back. Its a great demo peice to show:
custom classes for materials (Panel, Beam)
communication between movieclips used as materials and 3D objects
using multiple collada objects (JediTrainingSphere and orb)
Using baked materials (Orb)
Using animated Movie materials (Beam, Panel)
Using dummy displayObject3D’s for animation purposes
the jedi sphere actually “looks at” an invisible dummy object to do it’s rotation to the next panel
the camera watches a dummy object go from the middle of the sphere to the panel – as if it were watching the animation of the beam flow out.
Using multiple types of materials on one object
Jedi Sphere uses BitmapFileMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial
Anyway, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!