Papervision 3d – getting started

Intro

I’ve been blogtrawling over the last few days, trying to get set up in papervision. There are a million ways to go about doing this, and a lot of it seems to come down to what system you’re running… and how much you’re willing to pay. The good news however is that you can do pretty much everything for free. Maybe this post can help some of you out there a lot of time.

Seeing as a lot of the code and software is still in alpha or beta, here’s my system setup and what I’d recommend in order to get going. 
Assumptions
  1. I’m going to assume everybody is going to work in AS3.
  2. I’m running on Windows Vista Business with 2GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo 1.8GB processor. I know this is all possible on a mac – you may be able to pic up some hints from the comments in the blog links that I’ve includeded.

Set up your development environment

  1. Download an IDE. FlashDevelop 3 beta 9 is free (3 RC 1 is not backwards compatible and earlier release versions conflict with the debugger). 
  2. For some help with setting up FlashDevelop, here’s some great tutorials.
  3. Get FDB, the debugger for FlashDevelop. You may need to install the Java Runtime Engine if your system doesn’t have it. Here’s some instructions on setting it up.
  4. Download the Adobe Flex Open Source SDK for free. The latest one should do… we’re only really going to be using the compiler anyway.
  5. Download the latest standalone swf players (debugger version) from Adobe. Drop them in the Flex SDK folder.
  6. Download papervision source code. Version 2.0 “Great White” (rev859) works for me. If you want, you can keep it up to date with subversion. That’s if you have subversion and know how to use it. Drop the source in your classpath for AS3 or in the same directory as your main .as file that you’re compiling in FlashDevelop.
  7. Get a base papervision template and drop it in your root classpath.
  8. Download and install Blender 2.48a (you can use Google Sketchup if you want… I prefer Blender).
  9. Download Python 2.5 and set up pythonpath in your settings.
  10. Download the Collada format import and export python scripts for Blender. Drop them in your blender scripts directory: %PROGRAMFILES%/blender foundation/blender/.blender/scripts
Resources:
  1. Papervision 2 – step by step setup, with examples
  2. Altered egg – modelling in Blender and exporting to Collada 
  3. Dennis Ippel / Michael Lively – AS export class for blender – couldn’t get this to work…
  4. Mike Lively’s blog – video tutorials and other great resources from his book.
  5. Andy Zupko’s blog – latest dev stuff from a PV3D developer. Check out the lighting / casting shadows and reflections stuff.
  6. Bright Hub tutorials by Matthew Casperson – in depth AS3 knowledge required, comprehensive coverage of PV3D offerings.
And finally…

The masters of 3d flash… have their own proprietary engine. Take a look at the amazing stuff the Russians are doing on the Alternativa Platform. Mind blowing. See how proper shadows work here.
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About this entry

You’re currently reading “Papervision 3d – getting started”, an entry on Monkey Business

Published:
01.16.09 / 9am
Category:
Flash & Flex
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