New Image_3D release
The new release of Image_3D (0.4-alpha) is out. It was quite some time ago, Richard Davey wrote his great introduction into Image_3D . He asked for some different types of lights, I didn't thought of, when I released Image_3D first. This needed a minor change in the API you use to create lights, but offers some great improvements. See changelog for details. You are now able to instantiate four different types of lights:
Bezier curve with spotlightsLight
The one you know.
Ambient
Is not influenced by distance or angle, so that this can be used to enlighten the complete scene.
Point
Same as light, but has a free exponential distance falloff. So it can be used with some kind of hard limit or blind out.
Spotlight
This one aims at a certain point, has a defined angle and a free exponential radial falloff in the intensity. You see an example on the right.
As always you are able to create your own types of lights.
I added a object which allows to create bezier areas from an array of points. Perhaps this one can be used to implement truetype fonts, but I hadn't enough time to dig into this, yet. I created a small animation which shows a cosinus sinus curve with some spotlights. I really suggest to have a look at this one (633 kb).
I the tomorrows issue of the german php magazine "PHP magazin" you'll find an article on Image_3D in which I describe the features and basic concepts behind this class.
For the next release I will try to create some tutorials and complete the API documentation for Image_3D. As you can see in the todo, The API is quite stable, and most of the features we need to implement in the basic classes are done. Textures are not, but I don't think they fit into the current design. If there is something you want to see in Image_3D, what is not implemented or on the todo drop me an email or leave a comment.
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Comments
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Tobias Schlitt at Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:36:00 +0100
Nice! :)
Link to commentJakob at Mon, 20 Mar 2006 03:13:00 +0100
cool.
Link to commentHallvar Helleseth at Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:02:00 +0100
I'd love to see this output scenes in SVG or Canvas. Have you had any look at it? SVG/Canvas and 3D is quite interesting in that it is already available to a large share of web browsers. But there seems to be many issues, one is the lack of perspective transformations on images. I've modified an example 3D SVG/Javascript implementation to load simple X3D files (via XMLHttpRequest). You can have a look at it here: http://www.sykosopp.com. Firefox 1.5 required + it's a bit slow at loading the first time. The "terrain" was modeled in Blender and exported to X3D (http://www.sykosopp.com/terrain.x3d)
Link to commentKore at Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:35:00 +0100
Image_3D has several output drivers - one of them is a SVG driver, which renders the scenes as SVGs - but this often results in quite large files.
Link to commentWith the new driver SVGControl you'll be able to perform simple transformations (like move and zoom) scenes directly in your browser. This will be released soon, I hope.
Hallvar Helleseth at Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:31:00 +0100
Sweet! I wasn't even aware that it already had an SVG output driver.
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