New Image_3D release

First published at Sunday, 19 March 2006

Warning: This blog post is more then 18 years old – read and use with care.

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 spotlightsBezier curve with spotlights

  • Light

    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.

Comments

Tobias Schlitt at Sunday, 19.3. 2006

Nice! :)

Jakob at Monday, 20.3. 2006

cool.

Hallvar Helleseth at Monday, 20.3. 2006

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)

Kore at Monday, 20.3. 2006

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.

With 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 Monday, 20.3. 2006

Sweet! I wasn't even aware that it already had an SVG output driver.

Asif sajjad at Saturday, 13.8. 2011

just going to give it a try, seems a great tools, i have been trying to do 3d image generation with opengl and then display in browser, just read about it and installed it,

can you please let me know if i can add texture in a max 3ds file?

thanks

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