I just posted an update to TiltViewer. The main difference is that there is now a free version you can download and use on your own website.
The list of updates is listed here. Many of these updates are based on the great feedback that is posted in the TiltViewer-Pro forum.
TiltViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.airtightinteractive.com/demos/ribbon/Ribbons3D.swf” width=”400″ height=”250″ fversion=”9″ allowfullscreen=”true”/]
Sometimes simpler is better. This is a modified version of my last experiment with only one ribbon. Right-click to go full-screen. I added a nice glow filter plus some color tweening. It looks a bit like 3D graffiti or Japanese calligraphy. I think it would look good projected big on a wall, or as a screensaver. The code was retro-fitted to work with Papervision v1.7, since the v2 alpha does not give access to a DisplayObject3D’s sprites.
I’ve been playing with this 3D bezier code for a while now. I finally got some nice motion happening. Click and drag to rotate the space.
The last time I tried this, the ribbon was actually a 2D bezier curve that was then rotated in 3D. This time I got a hang of the math to create real 3D ribbons.
Source code is here and includes instructions for how to compile it. The code was compiled using Flex Builder 3 and Papervision 2.0 alpha ‘Great White’ rev 387.
TiltViewer allows you to browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space. Images are pulled from Flickr’s Interestingness list.
TiltViewer was built using Away3D, a branch of Papervision. Currently Away3D provides better handling of mouse events for nested 3D Objects. One limitation of Away3D is that there is no access to a 3D object’s sprite, so you can’t apply filter or alpha effects. I’m guessing that soon these features will be added to both engines.
Does a 3D UI give more functionality than the equivalent 2D interface? No, but its certainly a lot cooler! Part of the motivation to build this was to explore ways to make 3D interfaces simple and intuitive.
Being able to load Flickr images into a 3D engine was recently made possible when Flickr added crossdomain XMLs to it’s image servers. Thanks Flickr!
Click here for more about TiltViewer.
To celebrate my newfound freelance status, I created a new splash animation for my site. It’s my attempt to bring back the old-school ‘Skip Intro’ era :). It’s an ‘After Effects’ style text animation using papervision, combined with some tweens and flash 8 filters. It’s semi-random, so each time you watch it, it’s slightly different. Only 24k (not including the music). Music is by Funkstörung .
This weekend I got a chance to play with Papervision. I combined Papervision with my bezier tween class to come up with this. It looks kind of like the ribbon that gets twirled around in gymnastics.
Papervision is the first Flash 3D framework that’s gained real traction in the dev community. The code is well organized and documented which makes a nice change. Also there is a lot of active development happening, including an AS3 version in the works.
You can download the ribbon source code here. To use this source, you will first need to download the Papervision code using an SVN client. Once you’ve downloaded papervision, copy over the contents of the zip file.
If you’re using Eclipse, the easiest way grab papervision is to install Subclipse, then do a File -> Import -> ‘Checkout Projects from SVN’. Enter the repository URL: http://svn1.cvsdude.com/osflash/papervision3d. Eclipse will create a new project for you and download the files.
Be aware that papervision is alpha and some things may not work. For more papervision help, check instructions here and here.
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