UnitZeroOne

Pushing around +300.000 3D particles, realtime, on screen, using Flash ? No problem, if you are using Adobe Alchemy & PixelBender to compile and run your code!

During my session "professionally pushing pixels" at FITC Amsterdam this year, amongst other things, I talked about how to best utilize parts of the Flash Player to get top performance. This is one of the examples I showed. What you are seeing in this example, is +300.000 particles being 3D transformed, projected and draw to 2D. And it does so at quite a good framerate (well, it'll depend on your machine too).

So, how do we achieve this ? The answer is a combination of PixelBender and Alchemy.

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A smooth shaded elephant.

Behind the scenes I've been insanely busy for the last months. But just to keep you posted on some progess on my side, here's some demos of me playing around with Flash Player 10's 3D API's.

I'll keep this short, here's some demos.

Some tests with shading : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

You'll notice that the speed slows down when you go up in the number of examples. The amount of triangles increase per example. Since shading is still one of the most heavy appliances of any 3D engine, I thought it would be good to start out testing that, and see how it would work in a realistic 3D engine environment.

Next, this is not adviced to look at if you get car-sick easily.....a pure speed test.

A bit slower then it could run using any of the new wmodes, but for speeds sake, we're getting there.

Source code not available yet. First I'm looking at how to optimize. And yes, I'm working hard on a new version of Papervision3D, with the rest of the team. Soon I'll post some better examples, including a BSP example.

You always have projects lying around that are to be finished...but probably never have the time for...

Today Exey Panteleev posted some creative use of Papervision3D and the Shaders in 2.0. Accompanying to his post he asked if it would be possible to run water simulation with Papervision3D....

Actually, yes...
Water Ball Experiment 1 Water Ball 2(cpu burner alert!)

As one of those things I never finished and probably don't have time to finish within the next month or so, I have two examples of Papervision3D running interactive water on top of a sphere.

Disclaimer : these things are hacked together experiments from a couple of months ago...as a result performance isn't to good. I'm sure that given some time they can run smooth, without burning your cpu to the ground. Hope you enjoy anyway