Sven Dens

Last Saturday I saw Carlos Ulloa at WFF doing a talk on Papervision3D. Carlos is the founder of this amazing project, and it was very interesting to hear him talk about how it all started and where PPV3D is heading in the near future.

Carlos worked for many years at Sony in London as a game developer/designer. It wasn’t untill Spark Europe in Amsterdam in november 2005 where the idea arose that it would be cool to have a good 3D engine for Flash, and Papervision3D was born. The first one to join Carlos to kick off the project was Joost Korngold (better known as renascent), and on December 1st 2006, PPV3D was first published as Open Source on OSFLash under the MIT license.

The team was quickly joined by John Grden and Ralph Hauwert, and in no time hundreds of other people jumped on the bus. PPV3D now has over 2000 bèta testers and it’s still groing.

The objectives for PPV3D were clear from the start: it had to be powerful and easy to use. People - especially people trying out Open Source software - tend to download a software and start to play around with it for a couple of minutes, and if they’re not able to get going with it really quickly they’ll just throw it away and never look at it again. So to make sure this wouldn’t be the case with PPV3D, the developers payed a lot of attention to the fact that people should be able to pick it up and start playing with it quickly.

To make it powerful, the team chose the following approach:

• production driven design
• optimized for high performance
• linear texture mapping
• hierarchy, instances and materials management

To provide ease of use, they remained aware of the fact that both developers and designers were going to be using the software, and provided features that would benefit both of them.
For developers, this is using an AS3-style syntax and making sure there are no maths required to make it work.
For designers, they made it so designers could use their own 3D package, create & modify stuff without having to recompile the SWF, and prototype their scenes easily.

Carlos then went into some of the deeper details of the framework, showing how it was architectured and how you can use it to build some truly amazing stuff. It would take me too far to describe the whole framework here, so I’d suggest you download it yourself and try it out. And you’ve seen it and used it, I guarantee you you’re hooked!

Papervision 3D release 1.0 is being tested for 4 months now, and only has some minor bugs still to be fixed, but the developers want it to be rock-solid when it’ll be released to the world. So for the final 1.0 release you’ll have to hang on to your socks for a little while still.

Carlos, thanks for the inspiring session and keep up the amazing work!