Thierry’s Technical Tutorials

As soon as you thought you had it all going down and dusted with Papervision3D 2.0 (Great White), guess what!?
A new release is in the making.. this will be known as

PAPERVISION X

Papervision X is the next version of Papervision3D and it is written completey from scratch, no recycled code, no rubbish. It is designed base on Flash10’s new 3D API. This will allow Papervision to take full advantage of the new 3D engine and 3D features in Flash Player 10.

You will also be happy to know that “Beta” titles will be out the window, and dot versioning will be used, which will make life a lot easier for everyone.

Dont worry just yet, PV2.0 isnt dead – there are still loads of features that are going to be made to the engine, and it looks like it will take quite some time until FP10 adoption rate is high enough before the plug is pulled.

This Part of the Shaders Tutorial series will show you how to add Phong vshader to either a dae imported object or to a basic primitive.

If you are a novice, it is advised that you follow this tutorial from the initial section that can be found here, which explains how to set up the files and the scene. Otherwise please read on.

For those following on the shaders tutorial series, i will be calling this .as file phongMat

package phongMat {
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.text.TextField;
	import flash.text.TextFormat;

	import org.papervision3d.cameras.CameraType;
	import org.papervision3d.lights.PointLight3D;
	import org.papervision3d.materials.shadematerials.PhongMaterial;
	import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.MaterialsList;
	import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Sphere;
	import org.papervision3d.render.BasicRenderEngine;
	import org.papervision3d.view.BasicView;
	import org.papervision3d.objects.parsers.DAE;
        import org.papervision3d.objects.DisplayObject3D;

	public class phongMat extends Sprite
	{ 

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Here is a little Firefox extension for Gmail that i think is absolutely AMAZING!

All you die hard Gmail fans out there should get this – only down side is that it doesnt work in any browser apart from Firefox

heres a snippet from the GlobexDesigns website about it:

Google Redesigned is a Mozilla Firefox extension designed by Globex Designs that aims to fully redesign the look and feel of popular Google services. This is achieved with Cascading StyleSheet (CSS) files which are loaded on the client’s browser. The extension simplifies the use of these styles by providing auto-updates, easy management and notifications of changes. You can also download and use the styles individually by going to their respective pages.

Click below for a  few screens to wet your taste buds

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This tutorial will assume that you have already created your custom video buttons, and allocated them the name of

• pauseBtn
• playBtn
• stopBtn

now to allow the buttons to actualy do something with the current FLV video, we need to link the buttons to some actionscript code in order to do this you must first open up the actions frame dialogue (press F9) and write the following basic lines of code for basic functionality:

//first we must create the Event Handlers
pauseBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, pauseHandler);
playBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, playHandler);
stopBtn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, stopHandler);

//Changing cursor to hand, so that the user knows that the button can be pushed
pauseBtn.buttonMode = true;
pauseBtn.useHandCursor = true;
playBtn.buttonMode = true;
playBtn.useHandCursor = true;
stopBtn.buttonMode = true;
stopBtn.useHandCursor = true;
//End Changing cursor to hand

//finaly calling the fucntions for each handler event
function pauseHandler(e:MouseEvent):void{
	vid.pause();
}

function playHandler(e:MouseEvent):void{
	vid.play();
}

function stopHandler(e:MouseEvent):void{
	vid.pause(); //pauses video
	vid.seek(0); //resets it to frame 1
}

and that its, very simple and easy – if you need help in understanding how to add custom buttons and converting them to movieclips, then please leave a comment!

This is a tutorial showing how to create a very clean and basic preloader for Flash CS3, using Actionscript 3.

to begin with  we must create our file.

1. click on File > New or (Ctrl + N)
2. Select Flash Actionscript3 and click ok
3. No we must give it a name, so Click File > Save As and give it a name, i called mine preloader
4. Once this is done we have the ablity to start editing our file

As usual you can set the file size for the document etc from the properties tab, but you can leave the settings as default if you like.

We now must create a new layer and call it actions, now in frame 1 of the actions tab (if you can not see the Actions tab, press F9) and type the following code:

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