Some time ago I developed some distortion classes in order to achieve an rgb split effect and some random perlin noise. I found out that a small “engine” for those purposes would sometimes be very useful (at least to me), so today I finally had time to wrap it up.
To call it an engine is maybe a bit overstated, actually it’s just a quick way to set up different types of distortion and change the amount of distortion applied.
I just want to share this little experiment with you. I have been looking for an easy way to use as3dmod to bend materials with a “lighter” 3d engine. But as3dmod works only with the more advanced engines like Away3D and Papervision (and it works very well with them).
However I sometimes need (wish for) a lighter version easy to use in normal small projects, banners etc. and this is the purpose of my own “bend” modifier. It’s really simple and can’t do half of what as3dmod is capable of (it’s not build with triangles but simply rows of squares!), so there’s no twisting etc. but only a simple bend is possible.
The good thing from my point of view, and the reason I created this, is that it uses the native 3d in Flash Player. My example swf below is about 12 kb including the TweenLite engine, and it compiles a LOT faster than my projects involving Papervision and Away3D.
Source will be up soon – it’s not rocket science, but maybe you can use it for something! The example is build by 32 segments – which is a lot more than I would usually do with 3d engines, but here it seems to work fine.
I still recommend as3dmod and the real 3d engines for serious 3d Flash work – they perform really well and offers a lot of posibilities.