Collada Animation Using Papervision3D and 3ds Max 2009

I recently got my hands on a copy of 3ds Max 2009 and was trying to play around with some animation for use in Papervision3D. I started out using the built in collada export tool, but the DAE parser in Papervision3D doesn't handle the nested tags produced by the tool. (see Tim Knip's explaination here) I also tried the ColladaMax NextGen plugin (latest and greatest?) and that too produced animation tags that Papervision3D didn't like.

The solution is to use the older version of ColladaMax (get it here). Make sure when you do your export that you select the correct .dae save type. The screencap below shows the correct option.

Papervision3D Anaglyph Scene

Ever since I was a kid I've loved blue-red 3D glasses and a while back I got my hands on a pair at the office. Just this week I finally got around to making use of Papervision3D to create an interactive anaglyph animation.

Here's how it works...

Basically you need to create 2 viewports and 2 cameras, one for each color lens. On the first viewport, set colorTransform = ColorTransform(1, 1, 1, 1, 0x00, 0xFF, 0xFF) to appy a blue tint. On the second viewport, set colorTransform = ColorTransform(1, 1, 1, 1, 0xFF, 0x00, 0x00) for a red tint and set the blendMode = BlendMode.MULTIPLY to mix the two viewport results together. Move each camera equidistant from the center of the x axis to simulate the distance of the eyes. Each time you render the scene, you need to render once for each lense.

In the demo source code you will find two important classes, AnaglyphScene and AnaglyphCamera. AnaglyphScene is akin to BasicView, and sets up the viewports, cameras, scene and renderers for you. You simply add your scene objects and when you want to render call AnaglyphScene.render(). AnaglyphScene also makes public a object named "camera" which you can move using moveUp(), moveDown(), moveLeft(), and moveRight().

If you do anything cool with this, or stuble on any cool use of anaglyph imaging please leave a url in the comments!

Demo

Source

Make Vista Speak!

I stumbled across an interesting post about a script that you can use to make Vista speak whatever text you tell it to. I knew that voice synthesis has been built into Windows for a while but I never realized how easy it was to use through VB. This reminds me of all the fun my brothers and I had with SAM (Software Automated Mouth) on my old Commodore 64 way back in the day.

Get Your Computer to Say What You Type [HowTo] Windows Vista Guides