I’m very happy to speak at Flash on the Beach 08 in Brighton.

My session titled The best way to predict the future is to invent it will take place on Monday 29th September at 10:15.

This session will focus on the techniques, workflow and planning necessary to overcome the creative and technical challenges when creating interactive experiences in Papervision3D.

I will present our latest project, a truly innovative research and development programme, giving an inside view of the entire creation process, from concept and planning, to development and art production.

FOTB07 was an outstanding event, with inspirational presentations, great partying and a fantastic atmosphere, and John Davey has been working hard on making this year’s even better.

Hope to see you there.

I’m seriously excited about speaking at MadinSpain in Madrid, on September 12th and 13th.

It will be very special to speak in my home town, and also to do it in Spanish. My idea is to present a selection of all the material I’ve presented during the last year, plus some new exciting work never show before.

Design collective Domestika have done an excellent job putting together a very interesting conference with top Spanish and international speakers, coupled with an exhibition from great designers and a panel discussion.

Check out their new site by group94 where alongside the conference info, you can play a 2D/3D version of Asteroids and even register your hi-score to win prizes.

We are very happy to see both Sony BRAVIA and In an ABSOLUT World shortlisted for the Cyber Lions awards at this year’s Cannes Lions.

We are keeping our fingers crossed!

Last May 9th we attended to the 2008 One Show Interactive awards in New York City, where Sony BRAVIA received a silver pencil in the Websites Corporate Image category.

Many thanks to the jury and organization, and congratulations to our friends at Dare and Digital Club.

I recently did an interview with EX7 that went live today. You can read the original in Spanish or the English translation.

Really like their articles and interviews with some of the most creative people in the Spanish scene, including a few talented friends. I’m happy to be featured among them.

Many thanks to Ernesto Frías for the interview and all the work he puts into EX7.

Sony BRAVIA has won the Experimental category award of the 2008 FITC Awards in Toronto.

Many thanks to the FITC team and jury, and congratulations to our friends at Dare and Digital Club.

During the development of the Realized Visions section of In an ABSOLUT World, we faced creative and technical challenges in bringing the cubes to life on screen.

Our solutions included some clever 3D math, the usual Flash trickery and help from the Open Source community, but mostly lateral thinking.

3D + 2D

The idea of mixing 3D graphics with 2D physics comes from this early trailer of Little Big Planet. The game not only looks amazing, but for an interactive designer, even the preview videos are an excellent source of inspiration.

To calculate the physics between the cubes, we chose Box2DFlashAS3, a port of Box2D v1.4.3 to AS3 made by Matt Bush aka skatehead.

Box2D is an Open Source 2D rigid body physics engine for games, written in C++ by Erin Catto, a very talented physics programmer at Blizzard Entertainment. Other Box2D based engines for Flash worth checking out are motor2 and Physaxe for haXe.

Version 1.9 of Papervision3D handles the 3D rendering, while our application takes care of updating the 3D objects according to their 2D counterparts in the physics engine.

Scene depth is achieved by combining separate layers of 2D physics. The cubes still live in a 2D world that’s placed at a specific depth. To avoid the overhead of running multiple instances of the physics engine, we create our layers from horizontal segments of the 2D world. Sometimes, this might produce poltergeist phenomena between layers.

Geometry

Our cubes are actually a group of separate planes. This allows for great flexibility in working with individual cube faces and the entire cube at the same time.

To be able to open the box, we also added a hinge node to those faces that rotate around their edge. To open a face we rotate it’s hinge.

The outline shows the final hierarchy, with a root cube node, four hinge nodes and six face planes.

Working with planes and 2D interaction, let us apply simple 2D logic to some 3D problems. Our application implements custom shading and sorting optimized for our scene setup.

Shading

To maximize performance, we render each face plane on a separate container, and choose between two shading modes depending on the cube’s behaviour.

When the cube is awake, under the control of the physics engine, we dynamically shade the container of each plane on every frame. Since the rendered output is much smaller than the original material texture, this approach is much faster than shading the material directly.

But for still cubes, with physics disabled or asleep, we only need to update the shading once. Baking the dynamic shading into the material isn’t particularly fast, but if done once, instead of on every frame, distributed among frames, it produces a faster to render scene.

Reflections

Cube reflections are mirrored versions of the original objects. The shading is darker and they are rendered on a layer with Add blend mode.

To mirror the textures without creating a new material, we invert the UV mapping of the faces of the object. This is the actual code used, were you specify the axis to rotate as ‘u’ or ‘v’.

function flipTexture( obj:DisplayObject3D, axis:String='v' ):void
{
  var faces:Array  = obj.geometry.faces;

  for each( var face:Face3D in faces )
  {
    face.uv[0][axis] = 1 - face.uv[0][axis];
    face.uv[1][axis] = 1 - face.uv[1][axis];
    face.uv[2][axis] = 1 - face.uv[2][axis];
  }
}

Camera

The movement of the camera is calculated by combining the result of different functions.

We start with Tweener for the transitions, then we add user interaction so the point of view follows the mouse and the camera rolls accordingly.

A steadicam function keeps the scene alive even when still. The camera also follows and zooms in a box when it’s being dragged.

Optimization

In low poly PV3D pieces most of the performance is taken by the Flash Player screen rendering. In our case, making extensive use of colour transformations, the situation is even more delicate.

We constantly adjust stage quality and material smooth settings to achieve the best balance between performance and image quality.

The application switches between MEDIUM and LOW stage quality settings as needed. Falling back to the faster mode if frame time drops. You can disable this by selecting the corresponding quality mode in the RMB context menu. We use readability antialias to avoid text pixelation.

Intro and video player default to H.264 MPEG if supported by the player, else plays an FLV version.

At the end of the day, extensive experimentation and tweaking is always needed to achieve the effects you have in mind. Sometimes it means rewriting it all, but it’s definitely worth it.

We’ve just come back from Sweden, where I had the pleasure to lecture at the Karlskrona and Stockholm schools of HYPER ISLAND.

We also enjoyed meeting the very talented and extremely motivated Digital Media students, eager to bring their energy and enthusiasm to the industry.

Hyper Island’s unique approach to digital media and business management education, challenges students with real problems and expects them to respond with real solutions.

If you are looking to build your career as a digital creative and are considering how to develop your skills, I wouldn’t look further.

Many thanks to Sofie, Micke and Tore.

I’m flattered to be featured in the FWA Silhouette series, alongside Moses Gunesch, Yugo Nakamura and Tim Nolan.

Written by Craig Elimeliah, the article passionately covers the development of Papervision3D.

Thanks Craig and the FWA.