I’ve been busy busy busy playing working on some experimental Papervision/Hype mashups which are now live on the RezzyNet site.

The Hype framework was officially released on Halloween and I took the opportunity to plug it straight into the Papervision cube thingy that I’ve been prodding and hacking for over a year now. I started by taking out all the existing functionality and used the SoundAnalyzer class from Hype to initiate the cube ‘pops’. The results were amazing so I added a FixedVibration to give it some character. It performs really well although you’ll need a decent pipe for the audio stream.

http://rezzynet.com/cube/Main.html

So, this got me psyched and itching to see what else I could do. I wanted to mix up the SoundAnalyser and the Oscillator so I created a row of 256 cubes in 3D space, set them to oscillate on the Y axis and then adjust the zScale for the SoundAnalyser range. This took less than an hour to setup and the results, yet again were impressive.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main.html

The next thing to do was to position the row of cubes in a circular path. I kept the camera in the default position … I just moved it back slightly. I liked the surprise when you first click and drag within the viewport to rotate the view.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main2.html

Finally … well, for tonight anyway … I adjusted the Math that created the circular path and created a spiral.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main3.html

Wow! I’m impressed with Hype. What I’ve produced here using Papervision and Hype is by no means complicated and full credit goes to all the amazing talent behind the scenes of the Papervision project and to Branden Hall and Joshua Davis for an amazingly accessible framework that even idiots like myself can have fun with and I will be sure to share my experiences by releasing source and doing some screencasts in the coming weeks. In the meantime though I would urge anyone interested to go and play for themselves.

http://rezzynet.com
http://papervision.org
http://hype.joshuadavis.com

My new website is finally live. It needs some TLC over the coming weeks but overall I think it’s sufficient for launch … especially considering it’s Flash on the Beach next week and I’ll be handing out a shed load of business cards.

If you’re visiting after receiving a business card then let me say that I’m sure it was very nice meeting you and we had such a laff didn’t we?! That time when you jumped into the sea with your laptop! You were so drunk!! LOL!! Anyway, wishful thinking … there’ll be no repeat of last years drunken shenanigans as I have a lot of catching up to do with old friends and plan on staying sharp. Talking of which I need to go and plan for the next three days.

Hope you like my new website and please get in touch to let me know your thoughts.

I’m working on a new Papervision 3D experiment which will eventually be the basis for my new and long overdue website. I’m not sharing the source on this one (yet) as there’s still a lot of work to be done and I will share the love when I’m completely happy with the results. This work follows on from the previous post with the 9-cubed wall experiment but in hindsight that example was riddled with bugs so if you are interested in this work I’d hang on for the new stuff. Alternatively, get in touch and I can share.
The following example is another cube-job but this time a block of cubes like a Rubik. Roll over the cubes to pop them out or use the TAB key to cycle through each block. Note they move out at an angle from the origin of the group. The block has been built so the co-ordinate space origin sits in the middle of the center cube. This is important and is something I got wrong in the previous experiment and is why the rotation of the wall is a bit kooky.
Use the Keyboard arrows to rotate the cube and toggle ‘free-view’ mode with the SPACEBAR. Please let me know what you think of the work-in-progress and don’t forget to take a look at John Grden’s Go3D engine for inspiration.

Launch Demo

I must be mad to publish something I intend to use as the basis for my new website but what the heck, no-one reads my blog anyway!

I’ve been playing around with John Grden’s wonderful Go3D which is an implementation of the GoASAP tweening ‘architecture’ developed by Moses Gunesch who gave us the legendary Fuse kit for AS2 … {sigh} … those were the days.

Launch demo

Right-click, View Source to grab the code and if anyone has any input regarding some of the comments in the code please do get in touch. You will need the Go3D and PaperVision 2 classes and there’s also a reference to the Thunderbolt Logging classes which I would urge people to check out if they regularly use Firefox and would like to Log their Flex apps in firebug as part of their day-to-day development.

Something that is bothering me is the way the Wall pops out of its container. This is something to do with using a UIComponent in Flex and seems to be related to a previous post of mine regarding the drawing of graphics onto a Canvas in Flex. You need to set the dimensions so it masks properly. If anyone has any feedback on this please let me know. I’m going to look into it when I have five minutes.

This CubeWall could just as easily be a SphereWall or PlaneWall and although it is a very basic look at what is possible it will act as a basis for anyone (like myself) starting out with PaperVision. I need to look into the lighting and shading now. More soon!