Posted by rob on February 29th, 2008
Here Carlos went on a revealing journey through the design and development methods used in the construction of the Sony Bravia website (released late last year) and gave a quick showcase of the current progress in his latest project for Absolute.
Nice touches to the interface were highlighted, such as the option of mouse or keyboard control, the perspective twist (seen above) to give a more interesting movement to the tv boxes, the fading zoom used in submenus and the saving screen states that retain the last viewed frame of the submenu when zoomed out.
Some of the more subtle design approaches of the interactive screens were highlighted, such as the use of filters in the lightcycle screen, 3d sound in the sound room, and pre-rendered animation for the droplets with randomised color.
The new work done for the Absolute site (In An Absolute World) uses groups of 3d blocks using 2d physics for navigation, that allows the user to directly push and pull blocks around in a realistic manner. Each box is actually a single item of content, that can be clicked on to open in an unwrapping 3d fashion. I’ll post an update link here when the site goes live.
*UPDATE* - site is now live, check out http://www.absolut.com/iaaw
Posted by rob on February 26th, 2008
This presentation had John Grden and Trevor Burton introducing their latest project - a Java/Flash based online MMO called Paperworld. The entire project will be released open source in April, but for now the demos shown gave a good idea of what we can expect in the coming months…
Paperworld consists of two parts - an extended Red5 framework on the server side streaming multiplayer data, and a custom Papervision3d framework on the client side rendering the 3d view. Presently there are many utilities and modules tools being developed and pooled for use by other developers and designers, to aid things like avatar creation, loading and movement management.
The Paperworld framework relies on precalc’d 3d transformations on the server that are pushed to the client - partly for speed reasons and partly to maintain coherence in multiplayer movement. The Flash client smooths server proxy positions and the current local position of your avatar to give a motion that is a little more robust to fluctuations in latency. To get round the problem of larger 3d environments choking on download bandwidth, the Paperworld server does not use sharedobjects, but has relevant set selection - a technique which checks how far away an object is from each player, taking into account direction of movement, to intelligently load content
Currently a website exists for people to register their interest in the project, so if you would like to be kept informed of updates and releases of the Paperworld framework, goto http://www.paperworld3d.com and sign up!
Posted by rob on February 21st, 2008
The second Adobe sponsored poker tournament is upon us! Last one was great fun, and surprisingly cheap (as Adobe picked up the tab for all food, drink and poker chips).
The event is happening Monday next week (25th Feb) at the Loose Cannon Club near Cannon Street tube. Even if your a poker noob, i’d strongly recommend you give it a try as no one stands to lose anything. People who make it to the final table will each be rewarded with an Adobe product of their choice, with the overall winner also receiving an Adobe Max Europe ticket, and of course the much sought-after Adobe London Poker Tournament winner’s bracelet. Registration is madatory and space is limited - go to www.pokercoder.com to sign up.
Posted by rob on February 18th, 2008
Recent updates to the trunk build of Away3d include a revamped 3DS file importer. Enhancements include:
- Multiple mesh support
- Automatic texture loading
- Individual material support for faces
The update is based on AS3 code supplied by Masi Woermann, to whom i now owe a beer 
. You can download the source for the demo above by using the right-click ‘View Source’ option on the background of the swf
Plans to include auto texture loading for other formats that allow it are in the pipeline…
Posted by rob on February 13th, 2008
Strata’s Live 3d tool already allows the export of 3d content created in packages such as Maya, 3d Studio Max and Strata’s own Strata 3D CX in an optimised java applet for the web. The Away3d Team have partnered with Strata in order to allow the export of 3d content in Flash, providing more compatibility thanks to the ubiquity of the Flash plugin.
This should be great news for any designers using 3d in Flash - and opens the door for future collaboration aimed at improving the workflow for 3d Flash projects. For the full story go to http://away3d.com/away3d-enters-into-partnership-with-strata
Posted by rob on February 11th, 2008
It’s not every day you come home to a burning building - thankfully it wasn’t my flat! At first i had no idea where the fire was - i just knew the police had roped off all the streets around where i was trying to go. Got a pretty good view of the flames at one point - easily reaching higher than the 3-storey Hawley Arms they eventually engulfed.
As usual, the BBC had the best coverage, while at the same time being the slowest to react. I still prefer that approach to Sky News, however, who had more videos on their site but kept making stuff up about the area on their rolling news channel. Sensationalist as ever, but even after all their overuse of the word “Tragedy”, no one was hurt (which was almost as amazing as the fire itself).
Posted by rob on February 1st, 2008
A big thank you to everyone who turned up at last month’s LFPUG. The slides were created using Away3d, and can be viewed (complete with fancy stargate-style transition) by clicking the picture above. Navigate using the up/down/left/right arrow keys. You can also access the source files here, which will work with the current release of Away3d (1.9.3) and Tweener packages.
*UPDATE* video now available here on the LFPUG site!
Additionally, here are some of the links that featured in the pres.
VRML links:
Java3d links:
Shockwave3d links:
Sandy 1.0 ( Flash 8 ) links:
Papervision links:
Away3d links:
OpenGL ES links:
Misc. links:
Posted by rob on January 25th, 2008
The trunk version of Away3d found here has been updated to a release candidate version for 1.9.3. Full details of the additions in this release will be announced when the final build is tagged, but for now, here’s a sneak peek of the new projection and layering options available within the updated trunk classes. The source for this demo is also available - just right click on the swf background for a ‘View Source’ option. You will need to download the latest trunk build to publish the swf.
Rob
*Update:* Away3D version 1.9.3 is now available via svn or downloads section of away3d.com.
Posted by rob on December 3rd, 2007
While having a brief respite from the pressures of the very real 3d world, I managed to slot in a game for my friends over at creativestream. It’s a tribute to the slightly backward but still immensely popular Deal or no Deal game on Channel 4, and instead of money, you win christmas turkeys (among other things). You get one chance to win a prize every day, all the way up to the 24th. Surely that’s better odds than the lottery! Oh wait…
Unfortunately his paisley-shirtedness Noel was unavailable for comment.
Rob
Posted by rob on November 7th, 2007
I never got a chance to ask Robert how he got paid for doing this stuff, but i guess if we all knew that there wouldn’t be people left like him to impress us with the sheer complexity of his work. Essentially the subject of the presentation was examples of computer generated visuals using mathematical systems that included flocking, tendrils, attractors and so on. There are many online videos of the different systems that were showcased here, you can find them on his blog at http://www.flight404.com/
For jaw dropping visuals, the finale used the latest version of Robert’s Magnetosphere demo. This is a custom built particle effects system controlled by music. If your feeling like a wait you can download the full 193meg quicktime version at http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/, otherwise you can see a slightly smaller flash video version here (with different music). The visuals were created in an open source Java based graphics language called processing, on which you can find more info by going to http://processing.org/.
Rob
