In our session at Adobe MAX 2008 Europe we’re ready to show your works using Alternativa3D among our own stuff.

We’re also preparing partnership programme, along with placing works catalogue with studios’ contact information. We’re interested to cooperate!

Place links to your works using Alternativa3D here in comments, with any contacts or other information.

Mouse events
We’ve implemented mouse interactivity support for 3d objects. Now you can handle mouse events by attaching listeners to objects, surfaces and faces. Event objects contain all necessary information about the point in which an event has occurred: 3d-coordinates, uv-coordinates and affected elements of the scene.

Sprites
Now the engine includes sprites — objects that don’t have faces but only position in the scene and an image which is placed in that position. Sprites are useful for displaying various objects that do not need to be real 3d objects. Since sprites are built into BSP-tree, they are qualitatively sorted before rendering.

Developer’s material
The purpose of this material is to give a visual representation of BSP-tree’s quality. With its help you can see, for example, how much fragments different faces have or how deep in the tree they are lying. Such information may help you to optimize your 3d-model for better performance.

Adjustable clipping
It is possible now to set clipping modes for cameras. This allows not to render objects that are too far or, if the entire scene is before the camera and never leaves viewport, you can turn off clipping thus increasing rendering speed.

There is the Alternativa3D 5.5.0 update on the site.

Changelog:

• Added mouse interaction. Objects of the classes Object3D, Surface and Face can now dispatch 3d mouse events
• Added property View.interactive
• Added a new class Sprite3D
• Added new materials: SpriteTextureMaterial and DevMaterial
• Properties alpha and blendMode of the SurfaceMaterial class are moved to the base Material class
• Renamed following methods of the View class and changed their signature:
  • getFacesUnderPoint -> getObjectsUnderPoint
  • getFaceUnderPoint -> getObjectUnderPoint
• Added controlled clipping in Camera3D
• Added unload() method in classes Loader3DS and LoaderOBJ
• Loader3DS and LoaderOBJ can now load transparency maps
• Added method Scene3D.hasChanges()
• Added methods for coordinates transformation:
  • Object3D.localToGlobal()
  • Object3D.globalToLocal()
  • View.projectPoint()
  • View.get3DCoords()
• Method Object3D.getChildByName() can now perform recursive search in all child objects
• Added property Object3D.transformation, which returns global transformation matrix of an object
• Fixed bug in the method Scene.drawBSP(), which occurred when there was a texture material without texture
• Fixed bug in texture rendering when UV-mapping is degenerated
• Fixed bug in the method Mesh.removeFace()
• Fixed bug in controllers, which occurred when coordinates of a controller were being set without any object assigned
• Fixed bug in the methods View.getFaceUnderPoint and View.getFacesUnderPoint, which led to incorrect results when view had transformation
• Fixed bug in the LoaderOBJ class, which occurred when the load() method was called twice
• Fixed bug in the method ObjectUtils.getClassName(), because of which names of the base Flash classes were incorrect

You’ll probably be interested to know that from 19th ’till 23rd of September Volkov and Karpovich made a tour Perm-Moscow-Zagreb (Croatia). During the trip they made some negotiations with russian and foreign companies (too official — editor).

It’s early to talk about results (we’ll tell you soon), but what we can tell you is that they were about to irresponsibly cross the border with Slovenia (Shengen zone) using rental car. They were captured and released soon.

Today Mikhail brought small RC helicopter, and was about to break our English courses.

Before that, our office park had only RC Hammer, walking talking dolls, vintage counting machine and first MacBook model.