Everyday 3D

I extremely happy to announce that I will speak at this year’s Flash on the Beach in Brighton. It starts two weeks from now and if you haven’t already got a ticket it might be too late, because they’re all sold out (sorry).

It will be my first appearance on such major Flash event. I am taking part in the Elevator Pitch session, which features 20 speakers (!) in 1 hour – 3 minutes each. So it won’t be a long presentation, but be sure – it will be intense. I will show a new 3D Flash experiment made especially for FOTB. The session takes place on the second day of the conference, Tuesday 22nd at 9AM in the Brighton Dome. Hope to see you there!

On a related note: if you live in Antwerp, on September 16th I will be also speaking at an event organized by my friends at Mr. Henry. I’ll present some of my new and older experiments and talk about 3D in Flash in general. You can find more info about this here.

On June 9th the Polish Adobe User Group organized a Flash Camp in Warsaw. It was the first meeting of this kind in Poland. I had the privilege to be one of the speakers. It was a one day event featuring 6 sessions all related to Flash & Flex. It aroused great interest in the local Flash Community and more than 300 people attended

We kicked off in the morning with a very comprehensive presentation by Serge Jespers on the Flash Platform. Serge went through a lot of interesting projects including some of the best Augmented Reality examples. He also showcased his favorite AIR applications. Apparently AIR is not used only for Twitter clients! But seriously, I neglected this technology so far, but I promised myself to fix this in the near future. I’m looking for some ideas for a simple AIR app now… a Collada viewer maybe?

Next, the Platform Evangelist from Poland, Piotr Walczyszyn gave us an insightful presentation on Flash Catalyst and the new Flash Builder. I use FDT to do all my Flash stuff for some time now, so all the things he presented were totally new to me. I must say I was surprised how fast and efficient the new workflow is. Things like working directly with PSD files in Catalyst look great (how many hours have I spent “cutting” PSD files and importing them into Flash!) He build a complete application connected to a database without writing a single line of code! It was amazing… and a bit frightening too ;)

Wojtek Ptak made a great presentation about building large scale RIA’s. Usually this kind of applications are not my primary interest but Wojtek showed us some really inspiring stuff and it was a pleasure to listen to him speaking.

Unfortunately I could not attend the other sessions, because I was rehearsing my own. It was my first public presentation, so I was pretty excited but also a bit nervous, especially that I did not expect such a huge crowd.

During my session, I focused on 3D in Flash (of course!). By showing some new and old demos I tried to explain the fundamental concepts of 3D graphics and how they are implemented in Actionscript. After my session I had a few minutes to answer some questions. Most of them were about Papervision3D, and the nature of those questions clearly showed that they were coming from very experienced developers. I did my best to answer all of them.

Overall it was a great experience, and I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me. I like the idea of public speaking. It’s a great way to share some thoughts and knowledge, but also, most importantly, to meet interesting people. I feel it nicely complements my blogging experience, so from now on I’ll be looking for more speaking opportunities.

PDFBook3D is a Flash application that allows to transform a PDF document into a 3D model, that later can be viewed pretty much like a real book. The product was just released by Powerflasher, and I was involved in creating the front-end 3d Flash part of it.

This application belongs to the family of flipbook engines. I am sure you have seen the classic 2D version of a flipbook at least once. It is widely popular around the web! PDFBook3D replaces this classic piece with a more accurate and realistic 3D version of the effect created with AS3Dmod bend modifier. The bend modifier allows to create paper simulation in Flash, which is something I already posted about back in November.

The application has a rich set of configurable properties, including dimensions of the book (for non typical page sizes) and a number of quality settings to get a decent framerate on slower machines as well. The Powerflasher team created an admin interface to generate 3d books on the fly. You can see it in action here. The product functionality also includes links editor and video embedding. If you are interested in more information please refer to the Powerflasher Solutions site.

PDFBook3D is also my first commercial project made using Away3D. There are a few features in Away3D that made me choose it, but mostly it was the curiosity to try "the other" engine. I must admit Away3D turned out to be pretty cool!

It is most famous for its advanced features like normal maps, path extrudes and bones animation. However, this project does not rely on those advanced functionalities. Most of what I used in here is pretty basic, but still I was able to find some cool stuff.

One very useful feature is being able to assign back material to planes. It might not seem like a huge thing, but since it is used to create the flipping page, it helped me a lot. Actually any mesh in Away3D can have a back material assigned to its faces using the back property of the class:

Notice, that it is not the same thing as having a double sided material - that is, the same material used for both sides of a face. In this case - one material is used for one side, and a completely different one for the other. This is why it was perfect for creating a page of a book.

Another cool feature of Away3D is triangle caching - it is a built in functionality, that doesn't require any extra coding and it can give a significant performance boost. Thanks to triangle caching, whenever the page flip animation is on, the rest of the book that does not move at this moment is not re-rendered at each frame. A similar optimization can be achieved in Papervision3D using render layers, but it's not as easy to use.

Last but not least, I'd like to thank Fabrice Closier from the Away3D team for support and feedback during the project!

It is official - Flash Player 10 (Astro) is there, and you can download and install it from Adobe Labs. At a first glance, the most exciting things in the new player are (from my point of view):

3D support. Of course! Adobe says "Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know" so I guess a Sprite3D is on its way.

Custom filters support with Pixel Bender (formerly known as Hydra). I played with it a little bit a few weeks ago, but now we will be able to actually see it in action in the player. Sweet.

Performance improvement with hardware acceleration.

So be sure to install it, and check out the demos. The source code for the examples is provided too!

One weekend, two events, and they are due in two weeks. Pretty cool, isn't it?

On Friday May 23rd I will be at Multimania08 in Kortrijk, Belgium and on Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th I will be in Paris attending the Web Flash Festival 2008. Both of this events are dedicated to Flash and technologies that revolve around it, and both seem really exciting. There will be lots of interesting conferences including Ralph Hauwert, André Michelle and Quasimodo, presentation from agencies such as Group94 and Diplomatic Cover and much more.

I am looking forward in particular to learn new stuff about 3D in Flash and have some interesting discussions on this topic, so if you are attending one of those events and if you are interested in that too, drop me an email at bartek [AT] everydayflash [DOT] com or just post a comment below.

See you in Belgium and France soon!

Since a few days there is a lot of buzz about the Flash Player 9,0,124,0 Security Update. There seems to be a lot and confusing informations flying around on what's going to happen now. Without adding too much, I just want to share a very consise and clear article I found this morning on Adobe Developer Connection. Every new security feature intorduced in the update is explained there in detail, so go ahead, take a look and do not be afraid.