We’ve just uploaded a little teaser of my new studio website HelloEnjoy™, which I had the privilege to present a couple of weeks ago at Adobe MAX 2008 in Milan.

For those who missed it and want to get a sneak peek of the things to come, I’ll be presenting at ActionScriptHero.org’s End Of Year Online Meeting tomorrow Thursday 18th December at 18:00 GMT. It’s a free event and you can participate from anywhere, just register today here.

Afterwards, we’ll be heading to LFPUG to join the London Flash community for some Xmas drinks. Hope you can make it!

[UPDATE] Due to technical reasons, the ActionScriptHero.org’s End of Year Online Meeting has been rescheduled for January, date to be confirmed.

Our good old PV3D is been making friends lately with LittleBigPlanet, this year’s must-have computer game.

The PS3 title is not only amazing for playing and building levels, but also a great source of inspiration for 3D developers and designers.

To celebrate its launch, our friends at Agency Republic have created a Sackboy generator to showcase the unprecedented customization available in the game.

Using PV3D and PureMVC framework, the microsite lets you create and control your very own 3D Sackboy, the games’ stuffed hero. Then, once you’re done, you can share it via a number of options, including your own embeddable Sackboy widget. They even plan to integrate the avatars into the LittleBigPlanet game itself!

And we have another cool LBP-PV3D example coming from the ranks of fan artists. Rémi Toffoli has made a pretty nifty Flash version of the original game combining several OS libraries: PV3D, APE and WiiFlash.

Prepare yourselves to enjoy a lot. Because time is ripe for Open Source projects and 3D.

The Favourite Website Awards People’s Choice Award 2008, sponsored by Adobe is on, and we are very glad to find there are two PV3D sites to honour with our vote:

•  Redbull Flugtag Flight Lab
•  Spectra Visual Newsreader

This is the seventh year for the People’s Choice Award (PCA) and will be decided by FWA visitors and FWA newsletter members. So don’t forget to cast a vote for your favourite, you have time until 14th January 2009.

From the PV3D blog, we wish the best of lucks to both projects!

Fullsix Paris has developed this cute car configurator for Renault Twingo.

After the application chooses a car for you according to your face traits, you can then select car model and color, and turn your new Twingo, specially designed for you, 360º around.

The car has got around 2500 triangles and is in 3DS format. It was remodeled in low poly from a 75000 poly model.

Kudos to the developers: Bertrand Larrieu, Florian Garcia, Florian Bernard & Mikael Bouchez.

Here’s a nice music video generator by the guys at ALTERNATIVE DESIGN++.

The application will prompt you to enter a word (better if it’s some kind of category (e.g. feelings) and five other words pertaining to that category (e.g. joy, anger, sadness…), and will then create a typographic universe for each combination with results taken from Google Suggest.

The generated videos are archived in the site and users can embed them. You can read more about it in their blog.

Mook, the team behind the Nitro Group website, brings us a new interactive experience for Foot Locker.

Robert Sargent tells us all about it:

We recently completed development on an immersive Papervision3D experience for Foot Locker. The website is part of an integrated campaign for the launch of Nike’s Tuned 10 sneaker. The campaign was based around the concept of evolution and its visual aspects were informed by the “trixels” which form the sneaker.

Much of what you now see on the website came about after some R&D performed by Mook’s Flash Development team in July. Initially, we wrote a framework which allowed us to triangulate any 3D object and turn its constituents into objects in their own right. We found we were able to do this without too much trouble, even on complex Collada objects and objects with animated materials.

For the website itself, the custom object and material classes were refined to allow us to manipulate the triangles at a fairly low level, animating them to form different shapes, change colour etc. We began by using Tweener but settled on TweenMax after noticing a significant performance improvement. We also began working on a way to transition between different bitmap materials until we ran out of time.

The Papervision sits on our location-based architectural framework which we developed as an extension of PureMVC earlier in the year. The framework incorporates SWFAddress and will soon enable us to rapidly deploy accessible and searchable content underneath Flash content. Unfortunately, we had to disable SWFAddress shortly before the website went live. When we tested it on slower machines, we noticed that a change in the browser address bar causes a noticeable lag in the Flash rendering engine, making the website appear to blink.

The scope of the project was a moving target from start to finish, with the requirements changing repeatedly. We ended up doing quite a lot more development than is apparent on the site. For example, the camera controller has a number of applications which were not used. We even gave it the ability to react to explosions inside the world with a Battlestar-style camera shake.

The biggest hurdles we faced were related to performance. Our original idea was to morph between the sneaker in its entirety. Eventually, we had to compromise for a mixture of 2D and 3D effects. There’s a number of other things we’d like to improve upon, particularly the “static” feel between transitions. We feel the website still looks too much like the experiments did two months ago!

Overall, we’ve been highly impressed with the PV3D engine. The initial R&D incorporated the Great White alpha and we continued to use it during the site build. We were updating on a daily basis and fixing anything that broke which, I’m pleased to say, was very little indeed. We stopped at about revision 638, just before the camera classes were refactored and unified. This might sound like madness but if life in beta is good enough for Google it’s probably good enough for the rest us.

Great job, Rob, Tom, Andy and Miguel!

The very talented guys at Blocmedia were in charge of this amazing PV3D “tour de force” around Meta4orce, a BBC sci-fi show created by comic-book writer Peter Milligan.

The site, an interactive mix of episodes and games, is a truly complete experience of the series.  No wonder it received a children’s Bafta nomination.

You can read more about its technical challenges on the very commendable Iain Lobb’s blog. Iain is Head of Interactive at Blocmedia, and they’re doing amazing things with PV3D.

Dan Adijans and Brian Neon are the authors of this fun Flash game developed over a few weeks, using PV3D.

Play Q-Ball game and kick the football at the golden premier cups, try and get as many cups before the timer runs out.

I am very happy to announce that Papervision3D has won the INNOVATION OF THE YEAR in this year’s .net Awards.

Shortlisted alongside with such amazing pieces of technology as the BBC iPlayer and the beautiful In Rainbows by Radiohead, the list of nominees included Google Android and App Engine, Microsoft Telescope, Open Social and Silverlight 2.

This award holds special significance for us, as a recognition of the passionate work of the team and the contribution of our amazing community during the past two years. With your support we will keep working hard for innovation to happen every year.

Thanks a lot to all of you who voted for us and to .net magazine for this award!

Prepare yourself for a PV3D version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

Muskedunder Interactive, a Flash game studio in Sweden, is behind this very fun, very well done game for TriggerMomentum and Pepsi Sweden.

Excellent work featuring animated 3D characters to select difficulty level (LÄTT = easy, MEDEL = medium, SVÅR = hard).

Press the F G H J keys in rythm with music. Enjoy!

On Monday December 1st, Papervision3D celebrated its second birthday as Open Source project.

On behalf of the PV3D team, I take this opportunity to thank everyone in our fantastic community for their amazing work and continued support.

We’ve got a few surprises coming up, can’t wait to see what you create with them. Happy birthday!

Here’s one of best uses of PV3D I’ve seen so far.

Kicks Creator was made using Papervision 2.0. It allows users to color and paint a custom Nike Dunk by interacting directly with a 3D model. User designs can be submitted into a contest where the general public gets to vote and rate the top designs.

It was developed at R/GA in New York. More info on Noel Billig’s blog, one of the developers of this amazing site.

Update: It seems Nike’s site is broken, but we received this message from sneaker artist Chef:

I worked alongside a GREAT design team over the last several months to create this site. I provided the idea and inspiration and they did their magic. Papervision was used to skin the 3D model of the Nike AF1 we used as the “canvas” for this Kickz Creator. The set of rules used simulates what I am able to do by hand in my studio. Papervision was particularly useful in allowing us to use artwork from my sponsor 1800 Tequila’s Artist series on various parts of the sneaker. Embeddable 3D widgets were also created that allow full 720 degree rotation of the 3D shoe.
I am very proud of this site and the team that worked on it so hard.

Please check out the original GourmetKickz Creator, an incredible application for 3D product configuration and don’t miss out the great custom designs at GourmetKickz.

Digital Pictures Interactive, from Melbourne, was behind the development of this site for George Patterson Y&R and Cadbury Schweppes.

The campaign for their Spring Valley brand, involves ‘finding and meeting’ your own ‘Sensible’; a comical character that inhabits us all, and here you can have fun with your Sensible in various ways.

It uses the MD2 file format and parser to create one of the first commercial implementation of a realtime 3D character animation with Papervision3D.

More info here.

We’re doing one more of these before the year’s end and won’t likely do it again until February 2009. We weren’t going to do it at all, but we’d had a great response to do one more, so we’re squeezing this one in before the holidays really kick in.

I’m taking a break from traveling for a while, so RMI has set me up with some on-line course time and this weekend (SATURDAY), I’m going to pouring over the Winterwonder Land application and talking about optimization techniques for Papervision and the flash Player in general.

In the course files, I’m including nearly all the demo’s I used for the classes I taught in person as well as the source for Winterwonder Land’s animation engine etc.

If you’re interested, you can sign up over at RMI’s site:

http://www.richmediainstitute.com/node/277

Hope to see you there!

On the 4th and 5th of December we will be heading out to Venice Beach, LA for a 2 day Papervision3D workshop from the core, organized by RMI and your trainer will be Ralph Hauwert.

During this 2 day workshop from one of the core team members, you’ll recieve hands on experience both in everything Papervision3D, covering topics such as the basics of setup and deployment, as well as advanced features and usages of the award winning Papervision3D engine.

We’re looking forward to see you there. Make sure you register fast, since there are only 24 seats available for this workshop! Also, make sure you hang around until the 6th, since there will be a free Flash event the day after, with speakers such as Lee Brimelow, GMUNK and Branden Hall.

See course outline, location / order ticket at RMI.

Read more about LAFlashapaloozastock III

See you there!

[Correction added, this is a 2 day workshop, not 1 day].

During the last months, our friends from Blitz have been busy with the ESPN-NASCAR Results Simulator, which turns out to be quite an amazing technical feat.

1. Click and drag the drivers to the positions where you think they’ll finish in next week’s race.

2. Give a “Led a Lap” flag to any driver you think will lead a lap and give a “Led Most Laps” flag to the driver you think will lead the most laps. These flags will help you see how your predicting skills measure up when you review your accuracy after each race.

3. When the Results Simulator has finished you will be taken to the Overall Standings page, where your personal results are displayed. From here you can print your simulation, send it to a friend, or save it. Saving will allow you to revisit past predictions and review your prediction history. Just create a login and click your name at the top right any time you want to see how you’re doing.

That’s right!  Papervision3D now has integrated QuadTree support.  For those of you who aren’t sure what this means - it is a technique of subdividing the screen into smaller and smaller regions to resolve potential conflicts between triangles.  This is one solution to the common error found in the Painter’s algorithm that Papervision, (and all Flash3D engines) uses.

Papervision3D isn’t the first engine to incorporate QuadTrees into 3D Flash - and this is actually a port from Away3D.  Those guys did a phenomenal job at implementing QuadTrees into their engine - and after scouring the math and structure, very few changes were actually made to it - mostly just some big changes to get it working in Papervision, and a few extra features to help you out.  Be sure to give the Away team huge props for their work.

So to start using it, you will need to update your SVN, and check out the new QuadrantRenderEngine class.  For some demos and a walkthrough on how to use it, as well as some of the nuances of the QuadTree, check out my post, Using QuadTrees In Papervision3D.

In terms of what this means for the engine, it is a good step forward for Papervision3D.  Not only does it now give users 1 more option for handling z-fighting - it also setup the engine for some cool new features that will be coming out soon, including BSP and 2D clipping.  In addition, it got me going through the engine, and found some things that needed to be cleaned up.  All in all - it only means great things for the community.

Enjoy!

Taking place in Milan on December 1st - 3rd, Adobe MAX 2008 Europe is shaping up quite nicely, particularly for those interested in realtime 3D engines for Flash.

My session titled Advanced Papervision3D will happen on Monday 1st at 16:30:

Dive deep into the third dimension with the creator of Papervision3D and discover the secrets behind the latest interactive 3D experiences. The session will focus on the techniques, workflow and planning necessary to overcome the creative and technical challenges of real time 3D in Flash, giving an inside view of the entire creation process, from concept and planning, to development and art production.

Look forward to see you there!

Philippe Roy is the very talented designer behind the portfolio of Karim Charlebois-Zariffa.

Philippe had his PV3D initiation last February in San Francisco, in the class of John Grden, and since then, he’s been working on the website.

A great and simple 3D navigation. Very slick altogether.