Zachernuk.com » extrusion

Pseudo-extrusions in Away3D

Brandel Zachernuk — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:27:55 +0000

There’s no usage for this one, the objects just fall. It’s pretty though.

Way back in the days of Flash player 10, I started looking into the different technologies available for drawing extruded shapes. At the time, the Flash player could only handle unshaded scenes of about 3,000 polygons before falling over, because it was running entirely on the CPU. Because that wasn’t going to be satisfactory, I concluded that the best available alternative to Flash was Unity3D. Version 11 of Flash has added hardware-accelerated 3D, though, so I wanted to look at whether it’s practical to use it again. Unfortunately, Stage3D – and the things built on it like Away3D 4 – are still pretty new so there are a lot of features still missing that you’d normally expect to be standard. One of those things is ‘complex polygon tessellation’ . Since everything in a 3D engine has to be made out of triangles, it’s necessary to break up more complex objects into triangles before they can be drawn properly. It’s a pretty ubiquitous problem with some well-known solutions, so it’s only a matter of time before someone converts one of those solutions to Flash. In the meantime, though, I want to build complex extrusions!

The code above is using Away3D 4. I’m using the ‘LinearExtrude’ class for the height component of the object, and standard Plane primitives for the caps. The caps have a bitmap texture with transparency on them, which I have generated at the same time as the height component. A bitmap cap has the advantage of having a significantly lower polygon count than a tessellated extrusion cap, particularly for more complex objects, but has the disadvantage that the engine can’t do the same object culling with the cap triangles – because some of the faces are transparent, it has to draw everything that might be behind one of these planes in order to make sure that an object isn’t being incorrectly missed out. Another downside is the resolution of the cap texture – you can see when an object is too close or when the angle is too oblique that the polygon cap is slightly blurry and doesn’t quite match up with the height component. It’s not perfect, but it’s working well enough to keep going with.

Dabbling in Unity3D

Brandel Zachernuk — Sat, 08 May 2010 01:19:32 +0000

After looking into Java3D for a while, I liked it a lot. There’s a scene graph metaphor in there that help bridge the gap from something Papervision, which has a much looser method for scene control, to Renderware – or any other fully-fledged 3D system. It’s based on top of JoGL, which means you could delve down into openGL-like syntax for finer grained control, and most importantly, it runs fast enough to play with about 15 times the polygon count of Papervision.

The big downside, though, is that it requires Java (~17MB download) – and Java 3D (another 7MB) to run, and if you want to use it twice, chances are you’ll have to download it twice.

The only alternative I could really find was Unity3D, a relatively recent 3D engine and development platform. It’s hardware accelerated, runs on Mac and Windows (no Linux build unfortunately), and has a browser plugin that only runs to about 2.5MB – about the same size as Silverlight or Flash 10, but a lot simpler to install.

Terrific! The only problem is that it’s a Game Development tool with an emphasis on ‘Drag and Drop Everything”. As a programmer, I only really started getting into Flash when I could produce stuff entirely in code – while the visual editor is good for animation, I prefer to be able to see exactly what the computer thinks I’m doing.

After mucking about with Unity for a few weeks, I have begun to see how to circumvent the visual editor and work entirely in code, and I have managed to get to this point. Click in the blue region to draw points, click back on the first one to create an extrusion from it. If you click clockwise it’ll come out inside out, but making it counter-clockwise will make it normal.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

While this is pretty much the same as the Flash version I produced a few months ago, the fact that it’s in Unity means it can have realtime lighting and at least 15 times the polygons. I’m looking forward to taking this further!

If you’re not familiar with what Unity can do, check out the games made by Blurst. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I highly recommend Minotaur China Shop!

Extrusion shapes in Papervision

Brandel Zachernuk — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:51:32 +0000

As part of the early phase of experimentation in a potential project, I started fiddling with creating custom geometry in pv3d, rather than tweaking the vertices of existing primitives. The results so far aren’t perfect, but they’re looking good:

I’m not sure whether this is re-creating functionality that other people have already put into papervision, but it was a lot of fun! There are some issues with shaded materials, but so far I have bitmap- and colour materials displaying and it’s looking good. You can try it for yourself! Like the pale text says – click in the window to add a vertex, press space to close the shape. It seems to work even on pretty low-powered machines, so give it a try!