Nuclear Pixel

by Admiral Potato

A wobsite about Graphic Design, Web Development, creating Toys,
and anything else I feel the need to yell at the intercats. (I will end you!!)


Portfolio :: Interactive 3D Website for Zara Media Design Group


An interactive 3D website written in Flash ActionScript 3 utilizing the open source framework, Papervision3D

Posted in category: Portfolio on: 2011-03-06 21:47:34; Originally created on: 2009-01-13 20:23:16


Working with design direction provided to me from the creative director, I designed, executed and coded the an interactive 3D website for Zara Media Design Group. In the workflow for this project, I used Photoshop, Blender 3D, and the open source Flash ActionScript 3 frameworks, Papervision3D and Tweener.

Things that are true about this project

  • There is a dinosaur hidden somewhere in the book. Click on the Copyright information in the corner of the page for this easter egg.
  • I made heavy usage of the AS3 Tweener framework for the animations on this project. Tweener was really easy to work with.
  • I used Blender 3D to create the models, and made their textures yellow in Photoshop. This was the easiest part of the whole project.
  • Steve Jobs was right about how Flash sucks, and I know for a fact that his letter would have been even longer and angrier if he personally had to develop for it.
  • About every week, I updated my local copy of the Papervision3D source tree via SVN checkout to get access to new features and bugfixes, which caused the whole site to break completely for a whole day at least 5 times.

Things that are NOT true about this project

  • Working with ActionScript 3 was a breeze. It's internal consistency and well written documentation on the intricacies of the language's easy to understand syntax made everything so easy to code.
  • My experiences working with Flash on this site made me want to work with Flash in the future.
  • It was a good idea to use Collada as the format to store the models, because of how easy it is to read, manipulate and parse XML in AS3.
  • Having to write functions and loops to watch ProgressEvents and OnLoadEvents is not a waste of time at all, because there should not be an easier way to do anything.
  • I was not frustrated at all when I learned that the time I had spent learning how to use Papervision3D had been a waste because of the eventual death and discontinuation of the Papervision3D project.
  • I have no bitter memories associated with this project at all.