Blender users finally have a way of bringing animated models into PV3D thanks to the newest revision of Cast3D which now also features a dae2X3c converter (see previous post if you’re not familiar with cast3d). Dmitri Sviridov has been hard at work on fixing bugs and ironing out the kinks in both the blender collada exporter and the cast3d library.

You can see one of my animated models in the cast3d demo section. It’s not the most fantastic walk cycle ever, but hell it’s an animated model successfully exported from Blender into PV3D! Sweet! Cast3d features comprehensive timeline controls too.

(PS. Ignore the casino link on the top left corner - my blog has been hacked. I’ll sort it soon.).

Some thoughts on the Blender/Papervision3d workflow, collada and Cast3d. Read the rest of this entry »

I put together a small material demo file to familiarize myself with some of the shade materials in pv3d v2. It’s not exhaustive, only featuring the shadeMaterials (not shaders/shadedmaterials) but I found it useful in getting to grips with the various shading options in pv3d. It also includes some of the simple materials like bitmap Asset, movie Asset, and wireframe for reference.

Example
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(To rotate model, click + drag left/right)

For users of the SVN repository: This file uses an older revision (442) of the effects branch as there seems to be a bug with replaceMaterialByName and shadeMaterials in the more recent revision (444) at the time of writing.

I’ve been playing around with the animated property of the movie materials the last couple of days, because let’s face it, animated textures are pretty damn cool. The only things you need to do to set this up is to set the animated property of your material to true, and then to set up an enterFrame listener to render the scene.

If you set the smooth property of your material to true, then be sure to also set tiled to true or your movie may lock up at at certain angles.

Example
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Some of the coolest features added to papervision 2 (great white) are those relating to lights and shading. The phongShader also allows you to apply bump maps to your models:

//create simple material
var ballMat:MovieAssetMaterial = new MovieAssetMaterial("tennisMat");
//create bump map material
var ballBumpMat:MovieAssetMaterial = new MovieAssetMaterial("tennisBump");
//create phong shader
var ballShader:PhongShader = new PhongShader(pointLight, 0x145A22, 0x4AD766, 20, ballBumpMat.bitmap,
ballMat.bitmap);
//combine the shader with the original material
var ballShadedMat:ShadedMaterial = new ShadedMaterial(ballMat, ballShader);

Example
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To create a tile material, you simply need to set the tiled property to true, and then set maxU and maxV properties to the number of tiles.eg.

var tiledMat:BitmapAssetMaterial = new BitmapAssetMaterial("AlgaeMetalPlate");
tiledMat.tiled = true;
tiledMat.maxU = 2;
tiledMat.maxV = 2;

Example
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A composite material allows you to layer multiple simple materials in a new “combined” material:

var wireMat:WireframeMaterial = new WireframeMaterial(0xCCCCFF);
var colorMat:ColorMaterial = new ColorMaterial(0x00FFCC);
var compMat:CompositeMaterial = new CompositeMaterial();
compMat.addMaterial(wireMat);
compMat.addMaterial(colorMat);

Example
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