It was easy to get confused when sifting through my memories of CS4 demos with the topic = “3D”. I was lucky enough to attend a few CS4 release showcases at Adobe in SF and there was a lot of cool new 3D in CS4. The question is, in what apps did each new amazing feature or capability land? Well after a lot of hard thinking, searching, linking, and some drinking, it seems my ideas of what Flash CS4 and FP10 have received in the 3D area are a very few changes that have a huge impact.
First off, the first thing I realized was it is not a “this vs that” sort of issue as PV extends what you can do with Flash (AS3 really) and FP10. I have prepared this matrix to show what is possible in CS4/FP10 versus the older CS3/FP9 and what PV could always do. Remember PV is a library that runs on top of the base Flash player, therefore inheriting all of its capabilities. PV is a comprehensive 3D framework capable of just about anything you see in runtime 3D engines like XBox or Unity3D.
The best thing is that FP10 can do a few more things than FP9, most notably 3D transformations (move and rotate in XYZ). The UI has tools that allow you to change these values in the Flash IDE, or you can use AS3. Another good thing here is that now FP10 can now perform 3D operations much faster and “better” than FP9. At a high level, 3D transformations in FP9 had been calculated via a 3×3 matrix of parameters, this has been extended to a 4×4 matrix in FP10 allowing for the use of more advanced mathematics in 3D calculations. At least that is what I got from (http://tinyurl.com/7qasdk).
This new performance and the additions will only provide the PV developers with a great opportunity to do some refactoring of the areas of the framework that will benefit most. Another cool demo I saw was combining Flash filters with PV objects (http://blog.zupko.info/?p=76 and http://papervision2.com/playing-with-filters/) . Who will combine these things in the next Killer Kludgey way that will amaze all of us and say WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT!!! ?
FP 10’s native 3D capabilities have been referred to as “Postcards in Space” by many (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6731027747102186445) . This really seems like a good explanation. A movieclip can be scaled (X,Y), rotated, and moved in 3D space just like it was moved in 2D space before. All of the movieclip’s nested children MCs will be affected by these same transformations. Add these transformations with a simple Z ordering manager (not there by default) and combine the Z depth values with some filters and you have can do some pretty cool stuff.
REFERENCES:
A very interesting blog post that gets even more interesting as you read through the comments:
http://www.robertpenner.com/flashblog/2008/11/misconceptions-about-how-flash-cs4.html
