Papervision Collada Interactivity

Getting interactivity to work with Papervision3D Collada objects can be a little tricky.

There are two main confusion points:

1. The Collada class is a container for the 3D objects defined in the .dae file. You will need to get a reference to the child object of the Collada class for which you want to interact with. I found this to be a little troublesome because of some getChildByName not working as I expected it to. I also found it clunky to have to hardcode somewhere the name of the object as defined by the designer. So I cobbled together the following function to return the first child DirectObject3D for a given Collada object. Fortunately for me, the collada files I am using are simple and only contain one object per. If yours are more complex, you may have to go a different route. It's a little hacky as you can tell, but it works.

public function getColladaDisplayObj(tempCO:DisplayObject3D):DisplayObject3D {
var returnObj:DisplayObject3D;

try {
var childname:String = String(tempCO.childrenList()).substring(0,String(tempCO.childrenList()).indexOf(": "));

returnObj = tempCO.getChildByName(childname);
this.myDisplayObj = returnObj;

//trace("found colladaNode: " + childname);
} catch(errObject:Error) {
trace(errObject.message);
}

return returnObj;
}

2. Interactivity events are based on the material that is applied to the object, not the object itself. So, you need to obtain a reference to the object's material, set interactive=true, and then add your event listener to the object. Here is another function that I hacked together to retrieve a reference to a Collada child object's material.
   
   

   private function getColladaNodeMaterial(colladaNode:DisplayObject3D):MaterialObject3D {
   var returnVal:MaterialObject3D;
   
   try {
   var materialName:String = StringUtil.trim(String(colladaNode.materials));
   trace("materialName: '" + materialName + "'");
   returnVal = colladaNode.getMaterialByName(materialName);
   } catch(errObject:Error) {
   trace(errObject.message);
   }
   
   return returnVal;
   }
   

   
   

Another way to add interactivity is to create a material instance and set materialName.interactive = true, add that material to a MaterialList and then pass that MaterialList as a parameter when instantiating the Collada class. I personally am not a big fan of this approach however, because the Collada files I am using already have the material defined internally. Doing it the way I described above, I don't need to know how the object is named by the designer or the name of the material file.
If you have any suggestions, questions, or know a better way please let me know!