From Melbourne comes this great site developed by Michael Battle for DTDigital.

Michael has devised a cool transition engine that makes for a fine navigation experience through a great deal of information.

He explains the concept behind the site and how the engine works in his very commendable blog:

The idea was that I would create an engine that would allow the car to essentially be the puppeteer of an endless supply of dots - for example, when the car needed a road, the dots would swarm to form a road.

The DotEngine was created and I devised a number of demonstrations to illustrate its versatility. (…) The DotEngine prototype also had an editor, called the DotEditor, in which I could pre-program and test dot configurations and patterns. I built in everything from music visualisation patterns, to particle generators, to a dot-text and heightmap rendering system.

Great job, Michael, and congratulations for your wedding!

Great news from the 2008 FITC Awards in Toronto!

Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab by Less Rain has received the 3D and Best of Show awards, and Sony BRAVIA by Dare + carlosulloa.com has won in the Experimental category.

Many thanks to the FITC team and jury, and congratulations to all the winners and nominees.

The new ING Renault F1 Team website uses live F1 telemetry to recreate the experience of being in Race Control of a Formula 1 race.

You can see the team pilots on the circuit live, with a lot of information, data analytics and even a cockpit view. Just go to the team site and click on LIVE.

Created by Megalo(s) from Paris, with development by Samuel Eminet and Nicolas Bush.

Make sure to check it this weekend during qualifying and the race!

We’ve just launched dev.papervision3d.org, a new blog dedicated to our developers.

You will find news and announcements, significant SVN updates, tutorial links and useful content for the Papervision3D community. Aiming to build a bridge between companies and designers and developers, we will also post PV3D job offers.

We start with some content you might find interesting, Tree3D, a component to create 3D navigation in minutes, a behind the scenes article about IAAW, and a top job offer: Director of Flash Platform at BLITZ.

This blog will continue to report on news and general information, and also to showcase the best PV3D work and promote the talent of our community. Remember you can submit your work using the link on the sidebar.

A garage full of cars, infinite rubber to burn, Flash physics, and lots of 2.0 cool effects, this is Monster Burnout, the latest creation of our friends at Hi-ReS! and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, featuring the legendary Mr Doob.

As he explains in his blog:

Used the ubercool (and free) FlashDevelop 3.0.0 Beta 6 and it features box2dflash for the car 2Dto3D physics, a modified version of Papervision3D 2.0 (Effects branch) and, believe it or not, Tweener for the replay. Oh! it also features loud and annoying sounds, you’ve been warned

The game is a major technical achievement, and full of the careful details at which Hi-ReS! excels. A work to be proud of.

Welcome to the world’s northernmost sneakers’ store and showroom, in Norway.

Click on a shoe to zoom in, use the arrow keys to navigate between shoes, click on the shoe again to zoom out.

Kim Daniel Arthur has developed this really interesting shopping experience with PV3D 1.5. The interactivity is been done using InteractiveMaterials: adding standard AS3 eventlisteners to the movieclip container in the material.

The movement is achieved setting the target of the camera to the plane of the shoe. The tweening is done manually and lets the target of the camera reach its destination faster than the actual movement of the camera, in order to get the curved feeling.

Check their blog to see the real store.

Here’s another finely crafted PV3D site from GT London.

Ben Lunt, art director of Webby Awards nominee Rhythm of Lines, tells us how they did the elegant particle animations used in the transitions:

Interesting fact (ahem):

All the particle animations were completed in 3DS Max, utilizing the P-Flow plug-in from Orbaz Technologies. The resulting vertex data was then exported (using a custom MaxScript written by Dave Stewart) into a multi-dimensional array to choreograph the tile movement within Flash.

We’d done something similar with Rhythm of Lines, but from Maya to Flash, which was pretty straight-forward. Getting the data into a usable format from 3DS Max to Flash was, comparatively, a massive ball ache.

Creative Director: Russell Brown
Art Director: Wendy Hodgson
Copywriter: Mark Herring
Producer: Abigail Berger
Creative Leads: Ben Lunt & Stuart O’Neill
Designer: Nick Smith
Animators: Odin Church , Dave Stewart
Sound Designers: Pierre Thiébaut, with Neil Barnes & Nick Rapacciolli
Creative Developers: Adam Frankel & Jamie Ingram, Dave Stewart, Peter Wright

Great work, and good luck with the awards!

The Neighbourhood is a creative animation and illustration studio based in Manchester UK. They wanted a website that felt closer to the spirit of their work, more dynamic and three dimensional.

So they approached their friends at LOVE CREATIVE to create a real neighbourhood of districts that would make up different areas of their website. They are still developing elements for it and plan to grow and evolve the 3D space over time.

Gorgeous work.

Shackleton Digital, from Barcelona, has recently launched a PV3D site for their beautiful cancer awareness campaign, Forma parte de la Historia.

The site contains a 3D representation of a real aluminium monument to be built in Madrid. Engraved in the monument will be the names of all those who have collaborated in the campaign.

To do so, users can send uterine cancer info to a couple of friends via the site. Their name will first appear on the virtual monument, and later on the real one.

Great job.