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Recently, I’ve been playing a lot with Alchemy, an Adobe Labs project that allows developers to compile C/C++ code for use in AVM2. Brandon Hall does a great job of explaining exactly how Alchemy works, so I won’t bother.

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Yesterday my wife and I had an appointment for a 3D ultrasound. We wanted some better images of our new daughter, who we’re expecting in the fall, and this technology seemed like the best way. If you’re unfamiliar with 3D ultrasound, it’s essentially a machine which broadcasts the same ultrasonic waves used in a traditional 2D ultrasound but on multiple planes to simulate a 3D effect.

I thought it was super cool tech, but I could tell the nurse didn’t know how to respond to questions like “What formats can this thing export the spacial data?”. But really, playing around with 3D imagery of my unborn daughter is just too good an opportunity to pass-by. Luckily they gave us a CD of JPG’s.

Here’s an image from the set:

I thought this would be a great chance to play with the Pixel3D class Andy Zupko added to Papervision a while ago. It took some tweaking, but I like the end result.

View demo.

I spent a couple hours today playing with Andy Zupko’s Effects addition to Papervision3D 2.0. Great White is proving to be a huge step forward for the framework. My hats off to the PV3D team.

It's truly a testament to Papervision3D's ease-of-use that developers can leverage existing routines from previous 2D projects by simply modifying Movieclip references to DisplayObject3D. I put this little demo together with a set of stacked Mistubishi logos reacting to some slinky physics I built for a 2D AS2 project.

Here's an excerpt from the frame code that reproduces the slinky effect. You'll probably recognize this as a fairly conventional method of producing the same result in 2D. The only major difference are the references to Decoration3D which is just a class I built to extend DisplayObject3D.