RSS
I’ve posted a cubic panorama example in the Sandy forum. If you haven’t seen the announcement yet, this awesome ActionScript 2.0 3D package has just released version 0.2. It’s early days yet for Sandy but already things are very impressive. Check out the features, the source, and the forum at Sandy’s Blog.
A note about texture mapping in Flash. I didn’t go into detail about the transformation-matrix method of texture mapping in my article Prospects for Immersive Panoramas in Flash. The idea is that since a single Matrix cannot perform a 3D perspective transformation, we implement it by slicing the texture into smaller pieces (generally triangles) and doing a matrix transformation on each of them. So there’s a tradeoff: the more pieces we cut the texture into, the better the result approximates the true perspective transformation, and the slower our movie runs. This is how Sandy does it, and you can see the technique abstracted into a standalone class by Thomas Pfeiffer here: DistortImage. This class gives you Photoshop-style free transform in Flash.
I’ve posted this example online here: http://www.neave.com/temp/pano/
It’s a good start but it could do with using the mouse rather than the arrow keys, and it’s a tad slow compared to Immervision’s panoramic viewer. A good crack though!
Comment by Paul Neave — January 28, 2006 @ 5:31 am
I posted the example as a tutorial on coding the cubic pano technique using Sandy. Mouse navigation was explicitly left as an exercise for the reader, but it would of course make a nice addition to the tutorial. Would you care to contribute it?
This example is in no way a “crack.” The cubic pano technique is well known in the field and is so simple as to be understandable from a minute’s explanation – or from reading the tutorial. I worked with Thomas during the beta period to ensure that it would be supported in the 0.2 release.
Comment by alan — January 28, 2006 @ 11:40 am
Sorry, I meant it was a very good attempt (a good “crack of the whip”) at the cubic pano… not that it was a “crack” (hack) of Immervision’s version! I think the ease of programming in Sandy has many benefits over the timeline-based code used by Immervision, although I’m sure there are some optimisations that can be made to make the frame-rate quicker. Obviously an AS3 version of Sandy would give it a huge boost!
Comment by Paul Neave — January 28, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
Hi Alan. For some reason this does not run on my machine at all….might be the beta player?
Would love to see it though.
Comment by UnitZeroOne — February 20, 2006 @ 11:49 am
Can you see it demonstrated on Paul Neave’s site?
http://www.neave.com/temp/pano/
Comment by alan — February 20, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
do you how i can make an effect like http://www.dedededo.com.ar/modulo01/main.htm with sandy?
Comment by joe — July 9, 2006 @ 4:37 pm
Joe, that’s a nice effect, but I don’t think I’d use Sandy to duplicate it — I think I’d scale the several “planes” to give the depth illusion, and apply some nice easing to their motion…
-A
Comment by alan — July 17, 2006 @ 1:00 am
Hi!
Sorry to say, the link to your nice cubic panorama was lost, due to a hostile attack on the forum. The 1.0 version can still be seen here though ;)
http://www.flashsandy.org/sources/1_0/tests/CubicPanoTest/
It’s a beauty!
Comment by Petit — September 23, 2007 @ 10:01 am
I love this tutorial for perspective transformation.
Comment by estetik — December 6, 2007 @ 9:28 am
This rocks, but does it work with ActionScript 3.0? I can’t seem to get it working.
Comment by Mark Spencer — December 26, 2007 @ 12:44 am