Archive for the 'Flash Galleries' Category
I’ve listed some websites below for your flash inspiration. All of them differ in style, in the way they make you feel, in the way they are using flash to catch your attention. Try to use their Ideas in your works. Sometimes it’s not about user friendliness or usability for the flash websites we should also add the animation approach, unique concept, IDEA!
Enjoy and be creative.
In our previous posts we have considered several examples of creating really cool Flash Galleries with the help of 3D. As promised, today I’ll try to explain fhow to make papervision gallery. At the end we’ll get something like this – awesome papervision flash gallery. Probably at this stage the gallery looks a bit unfinished, one would wish to add progress bars for the images, image names and descriptions, navigation buttons next & previous, and etc. I’d like to cheer you up by saying it’s just the beginning. In this tutorial we’ll try to write the basics, that is to say an engine for our application. Over the next several steps we’ll add functionality to this gallery. Note we plan to write more tutorials based on this example.
In this tutorial we’ll try to build a 3D Flash Gallery using Papervison 3D. First of all I’d like to mention that the main aim of this article is passing through all stages of flash application development. At the same time we would like to discuss all contradictory questions one may face while working with Papervision 3D. More likely this tutorial will consist of several parts. Together with Papervision 3D library we’ll use Tweener for a better smooth animation and BulkLoader for a better image preloading.
You’ll need this archive in order to through this tutorial. This archive includes all libraries and applications which are necessary for the final swf creation. Flash CS3 or Flex Builder to be exact. If you know what Flex SDK is and you work with its compiler this archive is really useful for you. There is a lot of information regarding Papervision 3d on the net. You can easily find tutorials which teach how to download and install Papervision 3d and other libraries, how to adjust classpaths, and etc. It’s beside our purpose. Simply download this archive. Note you can use its structure and libraries like a start point for the other projects.
Tutorial difficulty level: Basic-Intermediate. We suppose even those of you who are the beginners in Actionscript 3.0 will do this tutorial with awesome results.
Using a simple example I’d like to show you main principal of working with Papervision 3D and tell you the truth of it’s power and strength. In my previous posts you’ve seen tons of awesome flash galleries using 3D effects. So I created awesome simple papervision gallery which is using XML file as an images database in this case in 3D!
I’ll try to do my best and write detailed tutorial in few days to help you study the papervision gallery code.
P.S. you could say that code is still raw and features still to be realized (like progress bars for images, image names, navigation bar). I’d like to let you know that it’s just the beginning sooner or later I’ll make a full functional 3D Flash Gallery and share it with you. I’m all open for your spam comments and ideas.
P.S.S. as i’ve told you here is a papervision gallery tutorial.
Here we are - back with the fresh portion of 3D Flash gallery solutions - in case you haven’t seen the previous portions please feel free to check out Part 1 and Part 2. The ones we are particularly interested in are the 3D galleries made with the PaperVision 3D framework. At the same time we don’t deny that there are lots of other alternate frameworks for Flash player - Away3D, Sandy3D and others - that are basically no worse than PaperVision 3D for implementing such kinds of things. It’s just that what matters today is not only releasing a product but also organizing a good support for it, to provide a documentation and tutorials for it and - what’s the most important - to attract Flash community towards it. Obviously that is why there’s so many PaperVision 3D based websites today.
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This is another example of arranging images into an arch. The distinctive feature of this website is re-sorting the foreground images depending on the category that you choose - web, video, adv.
(click the image to see the 3D gallery)
Couple of days ago we have posted a first part of our showcase of the 3D solutions in Flash galleries that we consider to be the most interesting. Since that time we have found some new good stuff that we are sure will be interesting for you.
Anyways, enough of introductions - enjoy.
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Probably the most famous application that by the way could have been the one to start the 3D galleries based on PaperVision 3D. Another guess is that it became so widely spread due to its free status that gave audience a chance to build their 3D galleries without any limitations.
(click the image to see the 3D gallery)
In a previous post about bringing 3D into Flash galleries we have uncovered a couple of ideas and trends that are typical for today’s developers. What we want now is to illustrate these trends.
Out of the numerous ways of displaying images with 3D I can mark out the following variants. Please note that they are all randomly ordered and this order does not in any way show the advantage of one in comparison to another. They are too different to be compared.
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One of the most available ways to make your gallery look good is arranging the elements in 3D space AND adding a little bit of camera movement after the mouse pointer movements. After the click the images “fly” to the same point and in that point we see the 2D image of a good quality. Nice and easy.
(click the image to see the 3D gallery)
Arranging a photo gallery is a very important issue in website building today. Of course for business websites designers don’t have to invent something new and radical. But in case we’re talking about photographers, design studios portfolios as well as individual portfolios the unique and attractive galleries are crucial.
After Flash player became widely spread the galleries took their strong position in the race of presentation tool. Even more popular the galleries became after the new development technologies have emerged in the world of Flash (like PaperVision 3D and other 3D frameworks). Even if the website is not Full-Flash the developers still prefer to insert galleries and portfolios as Flash sections.
Another important thing about developing the Flash applications with PaperVision is the productiveness. After having examined lots of examples almost each of them appears to have some aspect that could be improved. The others would be better if they had more effects or a smoother animation with bigger number of details. The thing is that today there are certain limitations that make it impossible to implement the designer’s initial idea - no matter how beautiful and attractive it is. That is why Flash developers have to use some sorts of tricks and hints, the more professional your developer is the harder it is to understand how he has managed to keep a high FPS rate with this number of objects.
One of the ways of creating top 3D websites with good productiveness is combining the software 3D (PaperVision 3D) and a rendered 3D set of images of FLV which is more popular. Everything that has to be interactive, everything that you want to rotate and press is created with the engine, the rest is being rendered. In the end you get a complete website containing tons of effects and 3D graphics - only a professional will be able to tell the software animation from the set of images.