A web designer & developer's blog

Meh, I gave up on my idea of switching to Away 3D, mainly because it’s stupid. While it would certainly make sense considering how papervision is most likely dead, Away3D is probably not that much more productive and better.

Considering how hard it has already been to figure out things like 2D/3D projection, dynamic materials and the insanely god damn uber-annoying animated dae models – besides countless mathematical problems – it would be a ton of wasted effort. I suppose there are solutions for of those most problems, but finding them is probably even more of a royal pain than it was to find them for Papervision3D. I don’t really understand why, but in general there seems to be a bit less blogs and tutorials around and since Away3D uses an archaic mailing list, there’s tons of hardly usable duplicates of every thread. And reaching dead ends means that you have to ask the question yourself, possibly waiting for several days before you get an answer.

While it would certainly make sense on the long run, the idea of having to figure all of these things out AGAIN, before I can continue with even the most basic tasks, completely killed my mood for months. So I’ll better continue with what I have, keep up the speed and maybe consider changing engines once I’m done. Which would probably be best, because molehill is at the horizon and will most likely change everything anyway…

Well, when I’ve gotten pretty far and ran across some random problem I’ve checked the Papervision3D forums, just to, again, stumble across some people asking whether PV3D is still being developed or not. Seemingly not. The last release is from 2009 and this blog post, where one of Papervision3D’s main developers leaves the crew doesn’t look promising at all. Furthermore, the development on PV3D’s Flash Player 10 / CS4-Branch as well as the development of the next version, PapervisionX, seems to have been on hold for about a year. That is especially easy to see at the PapervisionX GitHub, which was introduced for people to “watch the engine grow” and abandoned after the initial commit. Since then, nothing seems to have happened and while there’s no official statement, even the Papervision3D Forum Administrator doesn’t exactly believe that PV3D is sill alive.

Now that I’ve already spent some serious effort into learning PV3D, I’ve got to ask myself whether it still makes sense to continue or not. Continuing could be risky, because it’s always possible to come across a bug big enough that it turns out to be a final dead end, with no hopes of Papervision3D’s developers to ever repair it (because they disbanded long ago).

And even if I manage to get some project done, if PV3D isn’t developed any further, I’ve clearly bet on the wrong horse and acquired a skill that’s going to be completely useless. Oh my.

From a quick scan it seems that Away3D is the more actively developed engine right now. So I guess that, even though it’s quite a hassle to switch engines in the middle of a project, it only makes sense to spend a while looking into it… Meh. This is turning out to be a Duke Nukem Forever, but well, wonders do happen.

Update: Papervision may be dead, but Away3D isn’t exactly a good solution either. It’s neither more stable nor is it faster.

Google Analytics says there’s still people visiting the Ragnarok Online Bathunter flash-game from like thousand years ago (eight, to be exact…), so I’ve put it online again. Click here (even this banner is from back then, hoho, nostalgia):

This annoys me so much. I’m trying to get an animated 3D-model into Papervision and I thought it would require:

1. Building a textured 3D model in Cinema4D
2. Animating the model
3. Exporting it as Collada
4. Importing it into Papervision

Yeah. Nice thinking. Making the model is pretty straight forward, easier than I thought, but that’s just where the problems start.

1. Building the Model

Texturing is alrady a bit of a problem. First you’ve got to unrwap your model, outline the texture and export it so you can edit it in Photoshop. C4D even conveniently saves your texture as Photoshop .PSD-file (though PV3d hates those, so one’d rather stick with PNGs and JPEGs). Here’s a tutorial that explains everything nicely. Exporting the model gives you a properly textured PV3D-compatible Collada .DAE (Tutorial on how to import).

However: Papervision doesn’t accept multiple UV-mapped materials, so you’ll have to combine your model into one object and make one texture for all of it… But if you do that, you can’t animate your model anymore. Here’s a class that seemingly repairs C4D’s Collada exports, but it didn’t work for me.

You could try to build different objects and map each of them with normal textures, which PV3d surprisingly understands, but I haven’t tried it with anything more complex than 2 textured planes. Animation of course doesn’t work if you do it this way, why should it.

2. Exporting Animation

This sucks. While C4D’s Collada exports seem to contain animation, they somehow don’t arrive properly at PV3D. First thing to mind is that you can only use linear transitions, but even that didn’t help me. Moving vertices, the only way to animate objects if you reduced them to a pulp (see 1), doesn’t work. Pv3D says that there is animation description in the .DAE, but it only shows the status you’ve last had in C4D and DAE.play(); doesn’t do anything.

Moving normally textured objects doesn’t work either: the moving object isn’t even shown and PV3D doesn’t trace any info about animation in the .DAE. Weird. Some people seem to get past what I’ve managed, but frequently moan that rotations and transitions or a whole axis is ignored. Same thing seems to happen if you use Blender, which, btw., ignores C4D animation; so going through Blender is no option either.

Still to come: Controlling the animation

DAEMC seems to be a good class to control DAE animation (if I were to even get animation into DAEs), but the development has stopped and it’s only compatible with PV3D rev 911 and below. The author says one should move to Away3D, but a quick Google Search doesn’t really look promising at all.

Another alternative would be to use MD2-Models… Quake II models format from those ancient times where PCs had less than 200 MHz. That seems to work reasonably well with Papervision, but then there’d still be the problem of creating MD2-files. I’ve found a C4D-MD2-Converter, but it’s from 2005 (!!) and you’d need a Windows PC for it, which I don’t have. Milkshape also builds MD2-Files, probably I could also set up the different animation sequences there… but it also requires a PC and doesn’t even support Cinema4D. I might try and check if Cast3D helps, but then again: I’d first need properly textured and structured models, or don’t I?

There seems to be no proper and straight-forward approach to building animated 3D-models for Papervision. 3ds Max seeeems to be better supported, but I’d still need a PC for that (Oh, yeah, and 3ds Max, of course). Damn it.

The stupid approach…

… would be to skip building the models with 3D editors and just use the primitives PV3D provides. Cones, Cubes, Planes, etc. and script the animation by hand.

Yeah, right.

Even further down the road:

When I somehow survived all problems stated above, I’d still need to dynamically change materials and get dozends of low-poly models running smoothly. Urrrrgh. Is it hopeless?

Update: Yes it is. Animation only works with 3ds Max.

Summer is the season when I feel the necessity to take a cooling shower every five minutes and redesign my website, though I’m not sure if there’s a connection. Anyway: this summer is no exception. If I counted correctly, my website’s next version should be the eighteenth – quite the number.

My website was, to give a brief review, for many years supposed to showcase my drawings – only that I never had any, because I don’t draw. I make websites.

Whatever. The next version is supposed to be a bit more “mature” than previous versions; less experimental, easier to use and with a very reduced sitemap. A classic portfolio with anything you’d expect, though as good and sophisticated and complex and voluminous and fancy and creative as I am able to make it.

I’m feeling a bit awkward and embarrassed that I actually dare to say this, but I really want to get The FWA‘s Site of the Day award – the most prestigious online award and, in my opinion, the only one that matters. The technological and creative level of The FWA’s winners is incredibly high, they’re beyond any doubt the very vanguard of webdesign.

And even though I consider myself experienced enough to make good websites, I consider my chances to be rather slim. But failing won’t be a problem, because the next summer will come, without a doubt, and so will better skills :)

In any case, I’ll use this blog to keep track of this or other projects!