First off, the premise: I needed to create an interactive, animated 3D character in Flash, responding to mouse over events on its various limbs.

Basically, there are two main options in terms of file format: MD2 and Collada. MD2 is smaller, and it basically contains a timeline animation of the model, whereas the Collada format is bigger in size, but can contain an animated IK rig with bones attached to skins and all. This can be useful if you want to interactively control movement of the rig, although that was unnecessary in this case.
The rollover behavior of the limbs wás important however, and MD2 models being one single mesh, this option soon got scratched. Collada it was.

Now, when creating Collada files to load into Flash, you need a quite specific setup. Apparently, the best export plugin to use for this is ColladaMaya or ColladaMax. Turns out however that the most recent version of that plugin is no longer available for free, and furthermore it has turned out that the supplier doesn’t sell it anymore! So unable to find this ‘NextGen’ version of the plugin, we referred to an older version, but that one only works with 3DS MAX 9 and lower. Not 10, which our 3D animator uses. So lots of headaches there, but finally we managed to get our hands on the NextGen version of the plugin (here).

So, exports working, one down. Now for the correct Flash 3D engine.
At that time, I was using Away3D as I gathered that its performance is better than that of PaperVision3D. Initially I was using Away3DLite, but then I wanted to use AS3Mod to dynamically bend 3D planes, and that doesn’t support Away3DLite, just regular Away3D. So alright, I switched.
Then, just when we got all that exporting stuff to work, I discover that Away3D has a REALLY hard time correctly parsing our animated 3D models. What’s up with that? Imagine my annoyance when, after a day of toiling to get this to work, I desperately implement PaperVision3D as a last resort, and it works out of the box with our Collada files! Animation and all. Thank god for that!

Next day. More 3D modeling, texture wrapping, animating, that kind of stuff. Happy that we can finally get on with actually producing stuff.
A few hours into the day I get the latest Collada exports with textures and animation, so that I can start implementing it.
Cue a nearing depression when the animation is not working at all! At this point I’m pulling out my hair, because production is interrupted yet again by the failure of our tools to do the job we expect them to do correctly! No offense Away3D, PaperVision3D and ColladaMax teams, you have done awesome work, but when I can’t simply get a textured 3D character to animate in Flash while observing all the rules we know of and can find online, I tend to lose my nerve a bit. I’m sure you understand.

As it turns out, our model and animation works fine in PaperVision3D when we remove the texture and uv mapping on it. But obviously we need textures.
So right now, I’m sick of all this screwing around with plugin version such and 3ds max version so, render engine this and file format that.
I’ve opted to go for the most solid implementation I know, and that is the MD2 file format in combination with Away3D. Screw mouse overs on limbs, I’ll just fake it with a transparent 2D overlay on top of the 3D scene. I’m done, I have to get some work finished.

UPDATE
———

I have received a tip to check out the AWD project on http://code.google.com/p/awd/
At first glance this looks very promising, although I haven’t played with it a lot yet. I have exported to this format once, and that export ignored any animation, so I’m not sure if it can do that at all or not. But if you’re stuck, by all means try it!

Click on it to change the video. If it doesn’t run well on your computer, press the – key to reduce the number of particles.

Click image to open

Edit: download the source at the OpenFrameworks forum

Check out the video:

OpenFrameworks lightning renderer from Ralph Kok on Vimeo.

I must say I am not unhappy with the results sofar, especially since I have stumbled onto some nice byproducts along the way

Try moving your mouse and clicking every once in a while

Next, I fiddled around a bit with axioms, rules and angles and came up with some pretty cool new curves (if I may say so myself). Check them out below.
I’ve also added the renderer application, if you run it you can play around with the curves (controls are listed at the bottom of the app). If it is too slow, please decrease the number of iterations or resize the window to be smaller.

(full sized flash movie)
(download the source code)

We at Random were asked to help in the creation of an interactive video to go alongside the linear video.

After a lot of hard work, the result turned out, if we may say so ourselves, amazingly cool!

Check out the linear video here, and try the interactive here.

With the help of this post I created a simple but very effective random lightning generator in ActionScript 3.

I was surprised at the simplicity of it, and the clear explanation on drilian.com helped a lot.

So here it is: the lightning generator.

EDIT: per request I’ve put the source files online. Download here.