A little explanation about how to use it:

- File -> New Shader: Choose a sample shader.
- Help: Useful AGAL info.
- Shaders Panel: Write AGAL code here and see it recompile in real time.
- Log: If something is wrong with your shader, it will be reported here.
- Constants Panel: Add/edit your shader constants here.
- Attributes Panel: Determine what vertex attributes your shader uses.
- Samplers Panel: Set up textures/images for your shader here.
- Model: Change the used model or its transformation here.

Edit: The sources are now available on GitHub. This is in case anyone wants to help… If you do look at the source, sorry for the mess, I don’t have the luxury to spend enough time on this on a way that it’s tidy

Something that I would like help on (and think would be pretty cool) is the ability to save your shaders on an online database, that way we can start sharing shaders with this app.

Edit 2: v0.5 is up with a few improvements, the main one being the ability to use mip mapping.

In the video, you can see how a basic phong shader is loaded, its fragment constants tweaked and its shader code altered while the visual output updates instantly… The tool is at a very early stage, but already proves quite useful in facilitating shader experimentation in Flash. As you type, it recompiles your Program3D or updates the constants it needs, whenever it finds it necessary. Program3D exceptions are intercepted and sent to the log panel without interrupting your flow. During these exceptions, the output is simply not rendered but you are shown what’s wrong with your shader in the log panel. Notice this process running in real time while tinkering with the AGAL code. This should be quite helpful for anyone trying to learn AGAL, or just wanting to make a quick sketch of an AGAL shader.

Disclaimer: I am basing the design of AGALtheMEaN on Mac’s OpenGL Shader Builder.

No live demo or source yet, sorry. I will release both as soon as development reaches a reasonable stage. However, it is a good moment to express feature requests, suggestions, ideas, wishes, or any sort of comments about the tool, like for example, if you like its name or not

EDIT: Try out a very early version of AGALtheMEaN here.

demo

First of all, a “NOT-BIG-NEWS” warning. This is basic Stage3D stuff, but again, as part of my Minimole project intended only to experiment with Stage3D and understand how the big 3D engines out there work, this could help others understand Stage3D as it helps me.

Two things currently happening in Minimole: 1) being a bit fed up with how slowly Adobe advances Pixel Bender 3D, I decided that my dream of never having to deal with the difficult AGAL was not being realistic, so I started developing basic materials with AGAL. PixelBender3D materials are still there, each material will have corresponding PB3D/AGAL versions, so it could be a good resource for comparing them. For example, the phong shader I just committed to minimole looks like this:

Yeah. AGAL is mean. This doesn’t even combine shader bits as engines like Away3D do, but its a start in understanding AGAL. I intend to keep practicing the language and produce more “hardcoded” materials in Minimole, so stay tuned with the project to see more examples.

A note about this particular shader: In the PB3D equivalent of this shader, I was calculating direction to light and direction to camera in the fragment shader. This one performs such calculations in the vertex shader and interpolates them in the fragment shader, which appears to produce better visual results, appart from performing better of course.

2) Something I observe with Away3D is that it’s powerful material system is so complex, that it’s not easy to step in and write some custom shading. Having been playing with Cinder lately, I’m in love with how easy you can write a GLSL shader and inject it into a mesh. I wish I could do the same with Flash. So minimole will be starting to take this direction, that is, expose the Stage3D API in a more “creative coding” way instead of a “full rendering engine” way. My goal is to be able to use Minimole in a way that you can easily experiment with shaders in Flash. Cause shaders rule!

Given the unfriendliness of AGAL, the path will be hard. I doubt that I will be able to produce things like Haxe’s HXSL or Flare3D’s FLSL in the short term, but I will start by focusing on making this stuff simpler. The current state of Minimole fulfills this task a bit. You can easily create new AGAL materials and start getting acquainted with AGAL without having to worry much about the camera projection matrix, geometry, etc and directly focus on intermediate AGAL shaders.

If anyone has ideas on this “make custom shader development in Flash easier” proposal, please feel free to comment. I’m open to ideas.

Stay tuned for more news…

Watch the video in HD in Vimeo.

First look at Twitter’s Streaming API from Flash. The service returns real time tweets, which are then compared to specified search terms. If a match is found, the tweet is plotted on a simple 3D globe in red, otherwise, in white. The experiment searches the twitter database on users that have enabled geo-location only. It would be much more effective if more people had this setting enabled. It can also search in specific areas… The Streaming API looks great so far!

3D wise it’s not too special, just a sphere with an Earth texture, a normal map and a specular map. Longitude and latitude positions from the service are converted into cartesian coordinates and expanded to produce opposite line segment points. The points are contained in Away3D’s SegmentSet, which shares one set of buffers for about 16000 lines, so, there is little limit to the amount of tweets that can be plotted.

PS: Sorry that there is no live demo yet. I don’t seem to be able to connect to twitter outside from a web server yet . Any help on that would be appreciated!

Today I found a great tutorial for getting started with OpenFrameworks coming from an AS3 background, which is exactly where I’m at right now. I’m trying to expand to other languages for several reasons, specially for creative coding matters. Check it out, I really recommend it to anyone with similar interests: Getting Started with OpenFrameworks by Stephen Braitsch.

I added a bit of 3D to the source and connected it to an arduino. You can control zoom with a potentiometer and z rotation with another. Sorry for the crappy video:

Sources 1 – just the 3D addition.

Sources 2 – with the Arduino stuff (you need to load the firmata example on the arduino for the code to work, and change the arduino.connect() method in C++ to point to the appropriate arduino serial port).

[UPDATE] – These demos are not working at the moment. I apologize. There seems to be quite a few problems with PixelBender3D and the latest Flash Player 11 release. Since this is still in Beta, I suppose this kind of problems are expected. I am waiting for a new PB3D release and will update the source as soon as possible.

Demo 1. – Flash Player 11 required.

Demo2. – Flash Player 11 required.

It’s a bit slow, but I think it can be considered a good proof of concept. If this was implemented on a more advanced 3D engine, performance should be just fine.

Color transform shader based on this PB2D work by David Shelton.

[UPDATE] – These demos are not working at the moment. I apologize. There seems to be quite a few problems with PixelBender3D and the latest Flash Player 11 release. Since this is still in Beta, I suppose this kind of problems are expected. I am waiting for a new PB3D release and will update the source as soon as possible.

Demo.

Make sure you view this with red-cyan 3D glasses. Built on Minimole, fp11 needed.

I’d like to share a very small Molehill based 3D engine I’ve been developing lately. It’s called Minimole. It’s not intended for building complex 3D projects or supporting an extended feature set, but rather to expose how a 3D engine could be constructed on top of Molehill. It’s just for learning/experimentation purposes. If you’d like to understand how a complex, full featured 3D engine like Away3D’s Broomstick works, Minimole would be a great place to start.

Demo. – Flash Player 11 needed.
Keyboard arrows or WASD rotates the camera. Z and X moves the camera radially. Please be patient, the demo uses some pretty heavy textures (swf is 7mbs!) and there is no preloader

Minimole uses Pixel Bender 3D basic shaders, so it is also a good test base for shader experimentation. Setting up new materials and PB3D shaders with it is very easy.

Its design is based on Broomstick. I tried to keep it as similar as possible interface-wise and not really care about copying stuff from it since this engine is not intended to replace Away3D, but learn from it. You can consider Minimole to be a hyper simplified, less efficient, not lighter version of Away3D. The only advantage over it is that it is easier to understand.

I don’t intend to take the engine much further than its current state, but you might expect it to be updated and fixed in the upcoming weeks. If you’d like to comment on it, make suggestions, questions, etc. Please do!

UPDATE: Added a few more experimental materials like PhongToonMaterial, VertexColorMaterial, XRayMaterial, EnviroSphericalMaterial, EnviroCubicalMaterial… The reflective materials don’t work properly yet because of some issues with PB3D, but they should be fixed as soon as Adobe makes a few updates on PB3D.

UPDATE1: WireframeMaterial. This is a resolution independent one-pass solid wireframe drawn with triangles.

The experiment makes use of a small library I just uploaded to google code called as3bend. It has the ability of bending a sprite along a given path. The library makes use of swfvector in order to extract the vector data of a Sprite. It then uses a small modifier to align that data onto a path.

How might this be useful? Well, in my case, I am trying to make a plant whose skeleton is controlled by box2d physics. I could have done it with Flash’s bones tools but I found that accessing bone’s data at run time is rather uncomfortable, plus using box2d instead yields much more realistic results. The bones tool can bend a shape to follow a bone, but all this happens in the Flash authoring tool, not allowing you to do it at run time dynamically via AS3. So this is where this little library comes in, you just wrap your graphics around an OpenSprite object, specify a path to the modifier, and your graphics can bend to any box2d kinematics at run time.

I imagine this is a common problem in Flash, so if you’d like to collaborate with the project just let me know. I suppose this could be expanded to some sort of 2D version of as3dmod.

This is the demo we did a while back, now updated to the latest broomstick version, which was only exposed in video. The idea is not to produce realistic trees but rather demonstrate the polycount power of Molehill. With a regular macbook, I get around 26fps with over 4,000,000 polygons in the scene.

The trees are generated using a very simple idea exposed in this post.

The source should be available in the Away3D Broomstick examples soon.