Wow! Flash 8.5 / AS3 3D : Gouraud Shaded, Z Buffered Texturemapped Torus.
It’s friday night. I should go out, but I’m in the end-run off this big project I’ve been talking about lately, which means I am preparing to put in a weekend of work. But, as always friday night you should have some fun at least; so, I gave my self an hour to browse around, and somehow ended up on this japanese site, which offered this absolutely great Flash 8.5 example. It’s not much of a looker in terms of design, but the technical implication is really cool. I can just remember in the beginning of the 90’s, looking at amiga demo’s featuring these absolutely stunning looking (for the time) 3d techniques, like Gouraud shading, featuring awesome 4 channel (which were hardware, all 4 off ‘em) 8bit 22khz music, in ultra high res AGA graphics(yes yes, I own(ed) a 68030@50Mhz A1200), were being applied to the donut’s….
Brings back memories.
[wikipedia]
Gouraud shading is a method used in computer graphics to simulate the differing effects of light and colour across the surface of an object. In practice, Gouraud shading is used to achieve smooth lighting on low-polygon surfaces without the heavy computational requirements of calculating lighting for each pixel. The technique was first presented by Henri Gouraud in 1971.
[/wikipedia]
It was looking at these demo’s which made me want to do something with programming, graphics and motion, and look how I ended up….maybe this Flash demo is also more of an emotional thing it that sense 
Have a look at it at Psyark!
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8 Comments, Comment or Ping
chris Cot
haha…
yay flash is at a point of speed that was done in the early nineties on a 50mhz machine.
we should all be proud of our slightly slow friend.
Feb 17th, 2006
Ming
That’s neat! But I dont believe it’s Flash 8.5. I am running 8.0 on my mac and can see it perfectly.
Feb 17th, 2006
chris Cot
…and the 3d in that model is messed up anyway.
Feb 17th, 2006
Jo
Indeed, it runs perfecly on 8.0, the only (big) difference between 8 and 8.5 is performance. In 8.5 I have twice FPS than FP8, and it stills alpha version (3).
Feb 18th, 2006
Darrin Massena
Yep, Flash 8. I’d love to see how much faster it would be optimized for FP8.5 / AS3.
Feb 18th, 2006
Alan Shaw
Psyark is great; I call him the Andre Michelle of Japan. His Flash experiments are often just as cool. (I’ve posted a translation of his DisplacementMapFilter Tutorial.) But this example has a bug in the hidden-surface removal when you rotate the torus into an edge-on view.
Can I recommend the Sandy 3D API for AS2? Lights and shading are not in the current release but they are coming, as is also a port to AS3 of course.
The better performance of AS3 is going to be essential for the real development of 3D in Flash.
Feb 19th, 2006
Alan Shaw
Oops, my mistake. When I turn on z-buffer the hidden-surface removal works.
Feb 19th, 2006
Dan
Update: After a quick read of the EULA from Adobe, it appears that I was being a little naughty by bundling them together. Hence the quick removal/update of the original post (anyone who got here first was lucky). That doesn’t mean that you still can’t have a cracking CF dev environment. The zip I produced was files taken from 2 sources: Eclipse 3.3 and the ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse and the CFEclipse download section of the site.
To download and install CFE follow the instructions here. To install the CF Extensions just:
1. Download http://www.cfreport.org/eclipse/ColdFusion_Extensi… and unzip on your desktop
2. In Eclipse to o Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install -> Search for new features to install
3. Click on New Local Site…
4. Choose the extracted folder on your desktop
5. Click Select
6. Click OK and then click Finish
7. You’ll then be asked to select the features you want to install. Select ALL checkboxes and click next
8. “Obviously” read the Feature Licenses and the accept the terms
9. The installation page is an overview of the new features you’ve selected, all you need to do is click ‘Finish’ to run the update manager
10. The Adobe features will require you to install a signed feature, just click ‘Install all’
11. Finally, restart
Thats it, you’re now up and running. Your next two stops are the CFEclipse and Adobe’s ColdFusion Extensions site. Also don’t forget the reference section at the bottom of this post, espically Charlie Areharts list of over 70+ bloggers (part 1 and part 2)
References:
* CFEclipse.org
* trac.cfeclipse.org for documentation, bug tracking and logging, FAQ’s etc
* CFEclipse Mailing lists
* ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse
* Using the ColdFusion Extensions for Eclipse
* CFEclipse bloggers list, part 1 and part 2!
* Volkswagen van parts
Oct 2nd, 2007
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