ricardocabellov5.5

Ah... this facebook thing is just like orkut. I tried orkut some years ago, it was fun but then I was spammed by random brazilians that I didn't know. I tried to avoid facebook because that, but I registered last week just to see why the people were talking so much about it, and I though it was more clean. And it's good, it's more clean, better designed, good ideas on it and all that... but it has been only a week since I registered and I already received the first spam-ish email. Same shit.

So, consider myself out of it (if not now, soon).

Well, those guys have been busy for months since I did the first re-designs for the site. Yes, it was me ;) Mainly I set the overall style, icon styles, layouts, IA and a bit of UE reseach... and then Antti did the real hard work and continued everything from there.

One of the most important things in this new version is something that Andre Michelle have been working on for months now, the new sequencer.

And well, these are the big news for today, I got the feeling the project is going to be quite successful, and, although the new sequencer its a bit glitchy, as soon as everyone gets moving to the new CPU's it all will work much better (or Adobe makes the player even faster :D).

http://www.splicemusic.com/

Enjoy!

I'm developing a site that is giving me some issues and for some reasons I can't test the compiled swf inside flash, the only way to test it is in Firefox (well, or any browser). That means that I don't have trace() there.

Well, after trying to solve the issue blindfolded I decided to do a quick search and I found this nice Add-on for Firefox that lets you see the trace() output inside Firefox :)

Thanks Sephiroth (once again!).

Can you believe it? News like that make me see that I'm not that crazy for spending the time I spent in this stuff, this thing is cool enough to rise interest for a companies like Pixar.

Read about what I'm talking about here.

If you're not sure what's the name of the style of electronic music that you like, in this (ugly) flash you'll find a list + evolution:

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

http://www.cutandpaste.com/events/index.html

It looks a little bit silly imho...

Seems like the previous post inspired a bit Papervision3D developers to optimise the code a bit and get some performace boost. Ralph posted yesterday a zip file with 2 .swf (pre-optimisations and post-optimisations). It seems like, they have achieved a 40% increase of speed. It's a bit tricky tho, as soon as you reach the number of polys you then depend once again of Flash raster (aka beginBitmapFill), however, with multicore CPUs the improvements gets more clear (and also with lowpoly scenes).

After doing this, Ralph did another benchmark using the pink ball this time, as a joke he added a new value on the report: the doobies. Haha, well, the more you get, the more you can presume about your CPU ;)

Doobie Bench - RC1 version (Old)
Doobie Bench - RC11 version (Old)

So... Here are my results:

Intel core2quad 2.40GHz (My fastest CPU)

RC1:
Time: 12429ms, FPS: 29, PV3D: 4981ms, Other: 7448ms, Doobies: 46598

RC11:
Time: 10419ms, FPS: 35, PV3D: 3090ms, Other: 7329ms, Doobies: 55587

PowerPC G4 1.33GHz (er... My slowest CPU)

RC1:
Time: 76717ms, FPS: 5, PV3D: 21606ms, Other: 55111ms, Doobies: 7549

RC11:
Time: 65324ms, FPS: 6, PV3D: 12307ms, Other: 53017ms, Doobies: 8866

55587 Doobies!! beat that! ;)

PS: Doobies = Poligons drawn per second.

Alexander Zadorozhny has announced today a new revision of Away3D.
A lot of methods have been changed and seems like a new way of sending parameters (which is the same way Tweener uses) has also been introduced.

I think the API makes much more sense right now (just my opinion), and the fact that they also released a zip with examples for getting started, just makes it too tempting ;)

Something I always wanted to try was to get my old experiments working with Away3D, to compare the performance and also compare the visual improvement.

Way to go guys!

After doing the experiment with the fake materials and writting the controversial post the ambition of getting real materials grown on me.

For the people that doesn't know what I'm talking about when saying fake/real. In the last examples, the reflection was just a plane on top of the other texture and I was scrolling the reflection map. That's faking the reflection, there are no real calculations of what that face of the mesh needs to reflect from the texture...

I'm a bit lost on this, but it's only a matter of keep trying, testing, and getting deductions from the errors and results.

This is what I've achieved by now...

I was doing this a little bit like blindfolded, the UVmapping just gets the position of the texture from 0 to 1 for each vertice and filling the poly is easy. For doing the spherical environment mapping it was about getting the texture from 0 to 1 in relation to the normal of each face (as seen here). After messing around with the matrix, I ended up with this:



Well, it's a good start... after trying different values in the matrix I ended up getting this:



Better, and in fact, pretty nice rendering I think. And finally I reached something that looked like what I was after:



It's really messy, it's not environment mapping in flat mode, neither in smooth mode, it's what I have at the moment, here it's how it looks in another mesh:



So, for the people that were looking for the code... I'm not going to give it this time because that would mean having to zip papervision3d sources and in that way creating a working version that will last for a week or two only, so, instead I'm going to explain a bit what I've been doing...

To get to this point, basically I modified Face3D.as so every time a new face is created it also calculates the normal for the face (which, I don't know why pv3d still doesn't have this, because the code is really simple and short).

normal = Number3D.cross( Number3D.sub( new Number3D(v1.x,v1.y,v1.z) , new Number3D(v0.x,v0.y,v0.z) ), Number3D.sub( new Number3D(v2.x,v2.y,v2.z), new Number3D(v0.x,v0.y,v0.z) ) );
normal.normalize();

Then, on the MaterialObject3D.as I defined the property mapping_type which, by default equals to "normal", I can then change it to "environment" or "environmentFlat".

Having done all that, I only had to go back to the render loop inside Face3D.as and adding a Switch for each kind of mapping type.

At the moment the environment is not facing the camera, is facing a light in the scene, which means that if all this works we could simulate a better light than the flat one we have seen on away3D examples. It would be kind of Phong illumination.

However, in order to do that I've to modify the code a bit more so I end up using the normals of each vertex. Again, I'm a bit blindfolded here, but I think I'm on the right path... in a couple of days, maybe I'll have a bit more :)