Sean Walther's Blog

The First 3D Animation: Pixar in 1972

It’s nice to see how far we’ve come, but strangely … how similar things still are.  I can imagine doing this same thing today and being proud of the results.

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo.

Tags: 3D, Pixar

HTML5: Video, 3D, Javascript and a Big Buck Bunny

An article written by Sean Christmann over at Craftymind reviews some cool effects you can create with HTML5, Video and 3D featuring the Blender created Big Buck Bunny.

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Tags: 3D, Big Buck Bunny, Blender, canvas, HTML5, Javascript, open source software, Video, video 3d, w3c

Papervision3D update

So far so good with Papervision3D.  It took me a few hours but I’m already mostly up and running with the new framework.

Later on I will post each step that I made in working with Papervision3D.

When I learn a new framework I like to learn each of the basic tools first in their entirety.  It helps later on when dealing with more complicated ideas.

Along the way I’ve run across a few extremely useful sites:

• Mad Vertices – Jim Foley’s Brain.  Flex, Flash, Papervision 3D, Swift 3D and other cool stuff.
• InsideRIA – Useful blog touching on more complex flash / actionscript 3.0 issues
• EverydayFlash – Creative use of technology.  A blog about 3D Flash and Actionscript by Bartek Drozdz

Tags: 3.0, 3D, Actionscript, AS3, AS3DMod, Flash, Papervision, Tweener

Papervision 3D work

Among us flash web developers, who hasn’t tried creating a 3D engine of their own before?

I think it’s par for the course for any flash programmer who has taken linear mathetmatics or 3d coding classes at some point in our histories.

I’ll admit, my last official adventuring into 3D engine work was maybe 8 years ago back when I was in the Computer Science program at Boston University.

At that point it was mostly implementing ray tracers, DirectX 3D transforms and other basic 3d manipulations (stick figures, kinematics, reflectivity, etc.).

Flash has been much more “complicated” as it were.  Given the processing limitations it’s always been a game of artifically implementing 3D effects, as opposed to creating a real 3D engine.

In my upcoming project, I’ll be playing with Papervision 3D (Blog, Project Home, Official Site).  

I’ve followed Papervision3D for a while now, watching as site after site wins awards.  

The most interesting thing, is that the sites that win awards for implementation of Papervision3D don’t implement extraordinarily complex 3d sites (at least so it seems, maybe that’s the magic) but artfully integrate a 3d engine into their experience:

• Barcinski & Jeanjean – I love the unique “loader”, as well as simple early interactions to allow for loading, while the user doesn’t think loading is going on.
• Fat-Man Collective – A great website fully integrating a 3d engine with design, seamless, simple, and very effective.
• 13Flo – Ignore everything you think a website had to be, just take a look at this.

Results will be posted here.

Tags: 3D, Actionscript, AS3, Flash, Papervision