So this past weekend we took a trip to RMI (Rich Media Institute) in Toronto to meet up with John Grden for a crash course on Papervision 3D. For those of you that don’t know what papervision is - it’s a 3D render engine built entirely in actionscript 3 (there is a version built in as2, but nothing like the as3 engine). The engine allows you to bring an actual 3D object into Flash adding a Z-Axis and cameras. There were about 30-35 people in the class and the three of us probably knew less about papervision then everyone else there. We’ve messed around with it before a bit but could never get it to work right. We kept getting errors like #1009 using the components and never really got anywhere with it so we kind of gave up on it and felt we should wait for the class.

The class started off kind of slow. John had some pre-made objects and examples to give to us and with only 2 thumb drives, it took some time. After everyone got all the files, the class began with John explaining how to install and use the components associated with Papervision. This was cool because the components will allow us to dive into some cool stuff with ease and with little programming. Using the objects John gave us at the beginning of the class, we did some exercises bringing the models in and adding the textures using materials field in the component. The materials tab is a new feature in the v1.9 component that will be released soon (John gave it to us pre-release to use during the class). The rest of day 1 we went over some basic controls we have over the objects (i.e. - yaw, pitch, and roll).

For the last hour of day 1, we went over 3ds max, baking textures, and exporting a COLLADA file. The 3D portion of the course was based solely on 3ds max. There are versions of the collada plug-in for other 3D applications like maya and blender, but in the class we used Max. When we asked John about using collada for Maya, he had no idea because he only uses Max. This kind of sucked because at our studio, we mainly use Maya for most our 3D development.

So with that, day one was over. Now it was back to the hotel to sort all this out. We all had in our minds what we had to do… develop something to bring into class for day 2. The goal was to develop a 3D object, bake the textures, and export a collada file using Maya. So after a few hours of playing around with Maya and the components, we got it to work! Now I know we probably aren’t the first to do this, and to some of you, this may not sound like some great feat, but for us it was a big deal. Going into this course knowing very little about Papervision, then, at the end of the first day we were already building on it hyped us up a bit. For those of you interested in how we used Maya to accomplish this, Ryan is going to post a blog and add a screen capture video for a step by step guide to do it. He said he’ll have it up by the end of the week, so keep checking back for his post. Anyway, after Ryan figured out collada with maya, we felt using the component was cool, but not cool enough. From there we went further into the development by programmatically importing the object, adding the textures, and creating some custom controls for it. After about a half hour or so, Allan got it all in to flash using straight programming and no componant. From there we taught ourselves how to control it and manipulate the cameras to do some cool effects.

If you’re new to Papervision 3D, it can be a bit hard to find some good reference about it. Some of the more experienced developers tend to forget that not everyone is a professional. So by the end of this week, what we are going to do is post a tutorial on how we did it and we’ll add the source files for you to download to make it easier for you to follow along.

You can download the latest release of Papervision 3D via SVN here: http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/