This was a simple 3D carousel I created for the new Creston plc. website, which is the parent company of the agency I currently work at. The project was on a fairly tight deadline so I used Papervision. I really enjoy using Papervision and seem to learn loads of new stuff with it every time I use it.

I think perhaps the most impressive thing visually about the application is the reflections. The credit for this has to go to Seb Lee-Delisle as I was using his brilliant ReflectionView class that extends BasicView. View Seb’s post here to get started with reflections. One thing he doesn’t mention which I found very useful for making the reflections look a little more realistic is that they are placed on their own Viewport3D layer, which means you can drop the alpha down a bit and stick a blur filter on it.

The other thing worth mentioning with the ReflectionView class is if you are loading your swf containing the 3D scene into a parent swf you may notice that the reflection distance may change. This is because the on stage resize event handler in ReflectionView uses stage.stageHeight to determine the reflections distance. Fine if you are using ReflectionView as the top level for your application, but might cause undesirable effects when loading into a parent swf. You can change this by going into ReflectionView and editing the onStageResize method at the bottom of the class.

I’ve seen Seb give a couple of talks recently, in fact it was his talk at FOTB08 that really got me started with Papervision. If you want to use Papervision but are intimidated by all the classes, get yourself to one of Seb’s talks and in an hour you’ll have enough knowledge to get started!

The carousel can be found on the Creston site here http://www.creston.com/creative-showcase/.