Create 3D with Papervision

03/11/2008 | Filed under Develop > Flash

Paul Wyatt demystifies Papervision and introduces you to its Flash component. You’ll learn to create a 3D object then apply a texture and mouse movements

There’s been an industry-weary vibe about 3D and Flash. This mostly came about because trying to integrate 3D in Flash was a lesson in how to trick the viewer. It was also a world of pain, involving creating 3D objects with a 3D program then exporting them as bulky PNG sequences – and then importing these into Flash. Interaction was limited to whatever sequences had been rendered out from the 3D software. These were converted to movie clips and ActionScript added to them. It wasn’t the most fluid of workflows.

But Papervision changes all this. Courtesy of Flash, it brings real 3D objects and interactivity to your web pages. This isn’t about faking 3D in Flash … it’s the real deal. Papervision began as a way to transform movie clips to give the illusion of 3D space. This was achieved by changing their size, position, rotation and by skewing them. It’s come a long way since then, and now includes triangle tessellation, which is used to distort textures. These textures are then applied to the model in real time within Flash.

Papervision is developed and maintained by a core team of developers, who are continually updating and finding new ways to integrate 3D within Flash. One of these is via the Flash CS3 Papervision3D Component. In this tutorial we’ll walk you through the process of using this component. First, we’ll create a simple 3D model, and then apply a texture and some mouse movements to the 3D object.

We also have on hand one of Papervision’s core team members, Ralph Hauwert. Ralph has been involved in many different types of Flash projects. These include the award-winning House of Tomorrow. He’s currently involved in building the 3D web application Earthmine, which enables advanced geospatial exploration and indexing.

Ralph is also one of the team members at Papervision3D, working on the upcoming version, its features and the engine architecture. As well as all this, he’s recently conducted a number of training courses in Papervision in the UK.

About the author:

Name: Paul Wyatt
Site: www.paulwyatt.co.uk
Areas of expertise: Interactive web design, motion graphics and video
Clients: The X Factor, Fanta, Smirnoff and Research Studios
What was your favourite school subject? Art, of course!

Click here to download the support files
Click here to download tutorial PDF