More 3D in Flex (AS3)
This time it s a wireframe renderer that has "decent results with upto 25000 triangles".
Anjali Bhardwaj from http://flexarena.blogspot.com has ported an existing project to AS3 and developed further. It looks pretty cool but What Im really waiting for is the textured version she mentions is coming next. Were seeing alot of these exmples popping up around the place, but no news from Adobe as to if it is investigating some form of a 3d framework in the player be it Open GL or the likes. I guess what they have mentioned in the form of hardware acceleration support is really the first step. Would increasing the base player download size be worth the few extra capabilities i dont know.
I remember way back in the early 2000's the wars over the bid to become the standard 3d web based viewer and how most of the companies fell off the radar pretty quickly. Possibly the web wasnt ready for it. Is it now is another question. It is ready for decent video which the flash player delivers but 3d may be the next step. Say maybe the next 3 years?
papervision3d is also coming along nicely and now has a demo of a textured rhino that looks pretty nice
http://osflash.org/papervision3d
sandy is another one to keep an eye on.
http://osflash.org/sandy
Yes I remember those days when web 3D was just around the corner, and everybody was touting vrml and paying huge fees for licensing the cosmoplayer. Unless the performance rivals native 3D, I can’t see it catching on.
One idea I had was to use DirectX to render a scene and dump the screen surface into a bitmap, and then display those bitmaps as they are generated in a flash movie. Even 20 fps would be convincing. Getting user interaction between flash and directx in sync would be an issue, but it might work. Something to think about.