Genuine 3D in Flash

[jesmith]

Hello,

We've recently posted a demo on our site, showing how to integrate actual client-side 3D (implemented in Java), into Flash. The demo is here:

http://www.kaon.com/software/swflash.html

Any thoughts?

-Joshua Smith
CTO/Alpha Geek
Kaon Interactive

[Abelius]

Wow... This is really cool! :)

[andehlu]

AMAZING!!!! it kinda blows up on mac flash player a bit but i saw in on a pc.....really well done....

edit: just read this: On Mac OS X, transparency in Flash works poorly, resulting in flickering whenever the Flash movie repaints. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future version of the Flash player.

[petefs]

I think it's fantastic. Making it available only with purchase of a vSpace Master license makes it cost-prohibitive, however. If it were feasible to make available the Meson Platform independantly with a lightweight and streamlined featureset aimed directly at Flash developers, I am sure that many people would leap to use it. I understand that it may be impossible to come up with a solution like that, but at a more competitive price I know my studio would purchase a license.

Competitive...not the word to use, considering I believe that's the first true 3D I've ever seen embedded seamlessly in Flash ^_^ But looking at what's availble to Flash developers for $999 I can't see a studio like ours purchasing that before FCS, Flex, etc...

Either way, fantastic work, and it presents many exciting possibilities.

[xxlm]

Processing mate are free, and you can make flash and java to talk each others (see quasimodo website).
Oh and did I tell it's COMPLETLY FREE... ?

[jesmith]

I think it's fantastic. Making it available only with purchase of a vSpace Master license makes it cost-prohibitive, however. If it were feasible to make available the Meson Platform independantly with a lightweight and streamlined featureset aimed directly at Flash developers, I am sure that many people would leap to use it. I understand that it may be impossible to come up with a solution like that, but at a more competitive price I know my studio would purchase a license.

That's an interesting suggestion. What price point do you think would be the sweet spot for this technology among developers like yourself?

Also, among these features, which ones do you think you could live without:

- Decimation of geomtery
-- the viewer really needs polygon count < 30,000 or so for good performance, so we have powerful decimation routines to take tesselated NURBS models down by up to 90%; if you start with lightwave, 3ds max, etc. you can do the tessellation and reduction yourself and control polygon count during 3D modeling

- Wavelet compression
-- this gives somewhat smaller file sizes than JPG, supports streaming in texture resolution for highly textured models, and allows PNG-style continuous alpha channels in textures; without it, you would have to pre-compress the textures yourself to JPG or GIF format, the model would not show up until it was completely loaded (less an issue in a Flash presentation, I think, since you can have the 3D model loading while an intro is playing), and per-texel transparency would be limited to GIF's binary level.

- Non-Flash Templates
-- instead of letting you export a 3D presentation that works completely stand-alone, you would have to encase it in a Flash presentation to give the user buttons to play scripts, etc.

It seems to me that we might be able to drop all three of those features and still have a compelling tool for Flash users (we didn't use any of those features in that Diamond ring demo). But dropping them would make the tool considerably less useful to industrial designers and non-Flash users, so they would still want to buy the full Enterprise edition.

What you do you think?

[Gibberish]

Cant view the site. It crashes my IE everytime. Not erroring, it literally closes IE as if I hit the X close.

[jesmith]

Haven't heard that one!

I wonder if you have a corrupted Java installed? Try visiting a common site that uses Java, such as: http://tvguide.com/games/crossword/

[Gibberish]

yep same thing. I'll check it when i get home. I'm on my work comp right now.

[petefs]

Also, among these features, which ones do you think you could live without:

- Decimation of geomtery
-- the viewer really needs polygon count < 30,000 or so for good performance, so we have powerful decimation routines to take tesselated NURBS models down by up to 90%; if you start with lightwave, 3ds max, etc. you can do the tessellation and reduction yourself and control polygon count during 3D modeling

- Wavelet compression
-- this gives somewhat smaller file sizes than JPG, supports streaming in texture resolution for highly textured models, and allows PNG-style continuous alpha channels in textures; without it, you would have to pre-compress the textures yourself to JPG or GIF format, the model would not show up until it was completely loaded (less an issue in a Flash presentation, I think, since you can have the 3D model loading while an intro is playing), and per-texel transparency would be limited to GIF's binary level.

- Non-Flash Templates
-- instead of letting you export a 3D presentation that works completely stand-alone, you would have to encase it in a Flash presentation to give the user buttons to play scripts, etc.


The wavelet compression would be the only feature that I'd like to see for a streamlined flash version. Even though an intro can be playing while the model is loading, it's always preferable to consume less bandwidth. Every web-developer should be looking at bandwidth requirements every step of the way : ) The loss of the 8-bit alpha channel would be an even bigger hit, as far as I'm concerned.

Regaurding decimation of geometry: Most developers looking to add 3D to a flash movie should be familiar with low-poly modeling practices. It's always nice to be able to 'cheat', but controlling the poly-count yourself will almost always yield better visual results and performance. I think it could be safely dropped.

The ability to create a stand alone presentation in a flash-tailored streamlined version isn't necessary.

A lot of people are hot on processing now, as xxlm points out. I admit that I haven't dug deeply into the Flash->JS->Meson integration, but keeping this process as efficient, cross-browser/platform, and simple as possible is certainly a big selling point. The script samples that I looked at seemed to be well thought out.

My .02 : ) We have some projects on the horizon that could easily benefit from this sort of platform. When I get time I'll take a look at the documentation/demonstrations in more depth, and if you don't mind bring any questions or comments to you ^_^

[mashakos]

My win xp company workstation doesn't have java and I don't have install privelages!!!!!! :mad:

That's Microsoft's diabolical plan to sink Sun! They even have a killer plugin that allows for hardware accelerated Directx 3d by simple javascripting and this plugin is embedded in windows since win 98 second edition. Ofcourse it's "only on internet explorer" and only for windows.

I dabbled in it a long time ago (check the site (http://www.geocities.com/elarabisamples)) but it's useless if you are not a win/IE user.

I wish browser developers would implement 3d in a similiar fashion, it would make for some interesting sites.

[jesmith]

We have some projects on the horizon that could easily benefit from this sort of platform. When I get time I'll take a look at the documentation/demonstrations in more depth, and if you don't mind bring any questions or comments to you ^_^

Thanks for the feedback. I think we'll probably move forward on making a Flash-specific version for release at a later date, although, frankly I think we'll be focusing more on getting more tutorials and examples up in the near term.

I hope you've discovered by now that if you are just playing around / evaluating the software, you can get the $49 educational edition, and then upgrade to the enterprise license when you get a commercial gig requiring it.

[jesmith]

My win xp company workstation doesn't have java and I don't have install privelages!!!!!! :mad:

Thankfully, this is exceedingly rare, because all the major venders (Dell, HP, IBM, etc.) put Java onto all new machines they ship. I bet your sysadmin will install Java if you ply them with donuts. ;)

[mashakos]

I just checked out the daimond ring. Very nice. Is it hardware-accelerated?

[jesmith]

I just checked out the daimond ring. Very nice. Is it hardware-accelerated?

No, our viewng technology is pure Java 1.1 (no 3D plugin required), and thus cannot access hardware accel. Our viewer actually does a lot (such as 256x oversample antialiasing, 16+ mega-pixels of texture), which H/W accel would preclude. Of course, using pure S/W does have limitations. Performance becomes sluggish at about 30,000 specularly lit, perspective-correct, linear-filtered, phong-shaded triangles. You can read more about the viewing platform here:
http://www.kaon.com/software/swmeson.html

There is a comprehensive feature list here:
http://www.kaon.com/software/swmeson2.html

-Joshua