Papervision for Golf

I went through my golf craze in the 90′s and eventually worked my way to a single-digit handicap.  Although I don’t play any more,  I remember a lot of famous courses and holes, including the 15th hole at Bethpage.  At US Open green speeds, this setup is diabolical, but you can’t really get an appreciation for the difficulty of a hole from a few TV shots.  So, I was really interested when I saw this post from Carlos on a 3D recreation of that hole.   Papervision fans should enjoy the 3D and golfers should gain additional appreciation for the difficulty of the hole.

VectorVision and VizierFX

Well, you can’t have enough cool graphing and 3D tools.  I’ve just started working with VizierFX (network graphing in Flex), and may post some examples over the holidays if there is sufficient interest.  Will download Vectorvision (vectors in PV3D) over the holidays and experiment as well.

If you have any cool examples of either, comment here.

Vertex Animation in Papervision

I’m still really jammed up on time right now, but have to take a couple minutes to post some props for this really nice vertex animation demo using PV3D.

http://www.everydayflash.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/05/vertex-animation-papervision3d/

Source code is a available – thanks to Bartek for both the source and a nice demo!

Using Xray with Papervision

If you are a regular user of PV3D, you’ve probably already seen this, so this notice is for those who may have been away from Papervision for a while (like me).  John (aka Superman) Grden has modified Xray to work with Papervision so you can get detailed information on the objects in your scene.  While clearly useful for debugging, I can also see numerous opportunitites for using this tool in optimization as well.

Read more about it here and take time to pass only some props to John!

Papervision QuadTrees and Other Coolness

The thing I like about the Papervision team is that they never rest.  Sleep is not an option.  Just keep pushing and making the product better.  The latest installment is quadtree support. More about it here from John Grden’s blog. Quadtrees are an important data structure (named by Finkel and Bentley) that have significant historical use in the rendering pipeline and in terrain processing.  Good introductory article here on GameDev.  A variant of the algorithm is OctTrees and you can read up on both here and here.

If all this reading bores you, then spend some time on one of the latest cool PV3D sites,

http://assets.espn.go.com/nascar/resultssimulator/v2/index.html

and to think … people actually get paid to do this

Papervision Daily

So, are you looking for a regular fix of Papervision coolness (lucky you – no 3D in my immediate future)?  Then, look no further than the Daily Papervision 3D blog.  Adding this one to the blogroll and I do check it daily

enjoy!