Spice up your postcard 3D with environment mapping

Since Flash Player 10 introduced native 3D functionality, the world of “postcard 3D” rejoiced as doing simple 3D tasks became much easier… Just as long as it did not involve z-sorting or shading effects. The z-sorting has been tackled before, and here’s an attempt at implementing the second idea. Partly out of boredom and partly…

3D smoke: taking Pixel Bender to the next dimension

One final thing I wanted to achieve with smoke effects is to port the 2D simulation to 3D. Early results in pure AS3 were pretty disappointing, so again I turned to Pixel Bender and its speedy goodness. Still, the main obstacle was of course performance. The first step was to optimize the original 2D version…

Cloth simulation modifier in AS3Dmod

  I was recently invited to create a cloth modifier for AS3Dmod by Bartek Drozdz, similar to the 2D version I did earlier. In the unlikely case you haven’t heard about it before, AS3Dmod is a cool modifier library compatible with the most popular 3D Acionscript engines (Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy and Alternativa3D). To put it…

HDR Lighting in FP10 (+ Away3D)

If you’ve played any video games the past few years, you’ve definately seen the HDR (High Dynamic Range) effect. Creating a more brilliant colour spectrum, it’s both popular in photography and 3D rendering. In games it typically enhances the brighter areas and makes light spill over into darker areas (the so called light blooming effect).…