18 Oct 2007
Away3D fast animated bitmap material
by Alexander Zadorozhny
While working on the next demo for the new improved PhongMaterial, i wanted to add some animated texture on a model... but the MovieMaterial was just eating my cpu resources! So I've reused a concept I had in my bitmapdata engine. I think that the animators among us will love this one: the new Away3d AnimatedBitmap class... it's using no expensive draw(), no expensive copyPixels(), and it renders at the speed of regular texture like the BitmapMaterial! It supports also loops, and will support much more play options since it seams to be fast, but right now i've more than enough to play with, so I will first finish that PhongShading demo!
COMMENTS
makc said:
so, basically, you simply pre-render movie clip into array of BitmapData?
admin said:
Yes, it's so simple i don't even understand why it was not done before!! But there are of course some backsides like RAM usage, Mouse events... but i think that for most of elements that requires some animation with good prerendered definition like smoke coming out cigarette, evoluating cloud, water etc... that it's just perfect.
I will extend it further that's for sure...
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Jarrad said:
How would I go about tiling an animated texture?
admin said:
Tiling is on our todo list and as we see it, it should work on every materials we have. The engine reads uv coordinates. If the information is animated or not, it just doesn't matter, the engine will display it the way you will define it.
Right now we focus on the release 2.0 of Away3D. This feature will be added later on to the engine.