Nurbs!

// July 7th, 2009 // Experiments, Flash 3D, Source code & tutorials

In my previous post about Envelope distortion Fabrice Closier made a short but very interesting comment. He suggested nurbs. With nurbs a 3D mesh is not defined by every single triangle, but with the control and anchor points of the Bezier curves that form that mesh. So I made a small experiment by making the envelope distort “3D”.

nurbs with actionscript
Drag the image to rotate in 3D, the red elements are the top view, the blue the front.

» View test

One of the cool things is that you don’t have to project every single vertex,  but only the control and anchor points.  ( Assuming you can z-sort en calculate the normals without it…?  I still need to look at that ;) ). An other cool aspect is that you can easily change the quality (= number of triangles ) at runtime, by changing the number of segments of the beziers.

Its just the beginning, still a lot of research and experimenting to do before It becomes something useful. If it ever will…

Source code: source_nurbs_part1

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    • 4 Responses to “Nurbs!”

    1. Li says:
      July 8, 2009 at 2:10 am

      This is absolutely amazing!

      I’ve been wondering if this was possible in Flash for a long time. In fact, we’ve been pushing triangles to irregular nurb shapes in Away3D for a while and I always dreamed to be able to texturize these surfaces, that is, not only show them with wireframes or fills but with bitmaps that follow the deformation of the surface. So, I guess its possible then. Better news for me would be unlikely!

      Li

    2. nicoptere says:
      July 8, 2009 at 10:53 am

      pretty neat indeed.
      I also wanted to create a Bezier surface “editor” and lately I came across this post: http://www.geepers.co.uk/software/bezier_patch_tutorial.html that actually does it in Away3d.
      yet I belieive having it done in the native API is a good thing.
      keep up !

    3. Cay says:
      July 8, 2009 at 3:03 pm

      Amazing demo! this is so promising…

    4. 7 interessante sommerartikler · omFlash(); says:
      July 27, 2009 at 11:45 am

      [...] Nurbs! Ikke noget brugbart (endnu), men et rigtig sjovt eksperiment, der viser hvordan man også kan angribe Flash og 3D. [...]

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