ricardocabellov5.5

I was shocked the other day when I started to see on my stats, just one day after I posted the effect, people getting to the site with those queries on Google. That happened mainly with the international version of Google. Didn't work with the Spanish version.

Today, the "Happy 2008" moved down to #2, but "2008 Fireworks" is still #1.

Probably this has something to do.

Probably my last effect this year :(



Thanks for following my blog, and have a great 2008.
Have fun with the sources ;)

UPDATE
Some people were asking for the ColorUtils.as class, so, instead of sending the file by mail, I guess its better to update this post. But, if you want a quick challenge, try to recreate the file by yourself first.

"PHP reserves all function names starting with __ as magical. It is recommended that you do not use function names with __ in PHP unless you want some documented magic functionality."

http://tha.jp/
Maybe this is old news... anyways, simple and original as usual.

Now that we have some shading action with pv3d 2.0, I though it was time to revisit the real materials topic.

John already shown that Bump is now possible, so, testing a bit his code a I came up with something similar, but in this case I'm using Mars, and, guess what, you can change it's shape with a stupidly weird one (tho it's dynamic, yey!).



Next thing on the list was reflections. Not real time ones tho (yet), but Ralph also already shown an example with them. Here it's my version, mixing it with the previous code.



And you may well say, doh! seen it already... Fine... But, what about refraction? :D





Hehe.. it has been kind of fun... Source available from within the effect, (take a look at the top nav). But, apologies this time, there is a lot of stuff commented and unneeded stuff on them (I may clean them later).

Since the beginning I had a joke on my site (now blog) on the top right corner which was the FWA, best site ever ribbon. What I really didn't ever though is that I would be offered to add a real one at some point.

Well, what can I say? Really excited about it, and very encouraging to keep doing what I like to do.

Thanks FWA guys!

Right, so neither I'm Spanish, I'm Barcelonian.
Hopefully somebody will get it.

No, neither PV3D 2.0 does this render automatically, but again, this is just another example of what can you do being able to render the same scene to different targets.

The technical/physical part of this render is simple. Based on the main camera, you need to have to other cameras, A and B, one on each side of the main camera, if you displace the camera A -50 of the main camera, then you displace the camera B +50. The cameras need to be parallel, so you also have to displace the target of the cameras. Then, render the camera A and copy the red channel



render the camera B and copy the green and blue channels



so, again 2 renders per frame (which means, rendering 2x the amount of polys), then into a final Bitmap you mix all the channels.

Before doing it directly with bitmapData.copyChannel I tried using colorTransform and then using the additive blendMode. It worked, but wasn't as accurate as the proper way is, and it was much more slower.

The final test looks quite good I think, and the effect works with the proper glasses.



There is also another test done with the render mode, which was a quick modification of a test from Ralph.

I must say that it is not 100% correct, in theory the channel displacement should be only horizontal, in some camera angles the effect may not look right. I guess this could be somehow sorter, but I was too lazy again :P

And here you have the sources again! In case you wonder about how the ball.as was generated, I used a modified version of Jerome's AS3 Geom Class exporter.

Some people have mailed asking about how the shadows were done and where was the function in the API to create them.

Well, first of all PV3D 2.0 doesn't do the shadows automatically, but the new features let you do it (an many more other things). As soon as I knew that with the new version you were able to render the same scene in different sprites I though "shadows!". So, went quickly to give it a try and it worked perfectly. The idea is basically to do 2 renders per frame (this may be slow if you apply it at the end of a project). First render from the top of the scene, apply that render to the white plane at the bottom, and then second render from the user's camera.

This is the view from the "light camera" that gets rendered into a 512x256 bitmapViewport:



Next thing I wanted was to make the shadow a less dark, so, having already the bitmap, I just need to apply a colorTransform to it and make it a bit more pale.



And finally, apply a BlurFilter to the bitmap so the shadows is a bit diffuse



And that's all, this is the result:



Just as a last note... for the ball example I had to change before rendering the shadow the texture of the ball to black, and then change it back to the backed AO material.

Next thing on this matter will be to try to implement stencil shadows (because at the moment the shadow only works if the light is on the top, or one side...)

Oh! I almost forgot, here is the source file (requires flex2SDK, PV3D 2.0 and Tweener).