New Media Fun

I have been working on a module for physics to visually explain Conics. I choose to use Papervision to construct this learning module in flash.

The first issue I discovered was rough edges when a plane intersected the double-napped cone model. This problem was very obvious when the intersections where at angles that cut into the vertices of the model. This was around the time when the QuadrantRenderEngine class became available with Papervision 2.

So when I finally got back on track with this project, I was pleased to get the new QuadrantRenderEngine to work with the conics module. The plane cut through the model just wonderfully and cleanly. Until I rotated the model and plane to discover the render engine only helped the top side of the plane, not the back side. There underneath the plane was breaking up just like before.

So what to do? I tried 2 separate one-sided planes (opposite facing) and animating them separately, but this result was awful because of the inconsistent animation paths. Tried a cube, but that didn’t seem to work.

Until I finally realized that I could group the two opposite facing planes into an 3D object and animate the object as 1 item. Using the DisplayObject3D class, I was able to group and animate the 2 planes together.

Papervision certainly has its learning curves. But I am starting to figure it out.