A few days on PaperVision3D

So last week I had the opportunity to get my hands dirty with PaperVision3D. As mentioned previously, the company I work for has been responsible for implementing the 2008 Earth Hour website.

Well, as part of that, I had a crack at visualising the global support being given to the Earth Hour movement. Using AS3, I first load in a zipped text file containing lat/longs of each user sign up, and of those users broken down by country, which I uncompress and iterate over to create textures. I then use PaperVision3D to generate a set of spheres which I wrap the textures around, and add some simple mouse interactions.

I settled with an early release of the engine – but am keen to have a go at the 2.0 branch and see if it speeds things up.

Global Earth Hour supporters

Flash 9 player is required to view this content. It can be downloaded from Adobe.com

3D in Flash

Paper Vision 3D is a (relatively) new AS3 Flash 3D engine… using the greatly improved rendering power of Flash 9, this almost makes responsive 3D environments in Flash a possibility. Exciting!

Be sure to check out this demo. It’s nothing you can’t do with Quicktime, but boy it feels good on my computer :)