Papervision3d text effect, using anti-aliasing for “rounder” 3d “shapes”
Thursday, January 10th, 2008I’ve been wanting to do this for ages… Matter of fact, this was meant to be my “end of the year” post for 2007, but you know…
So, same old trick descending my sleeve. Create text, grab BitmapData from it, loop though its pixels and represent them with DisplayObjects.
Again, the ‘trick’ is to check which pixels are transparent. An interesting quality of Anti-Aliased text is that the “rounded” or “Anti-Aliased” pixels are the color of the text, except with varying transparency, meaning the text looks good on any color background.
I took advantage of this by generating “thicker” rows in the Z plane for darker pixels… Hard to explain in words, but let’s allow the screenshots and the app speak for themselves.
Click here to fiddle with my toy… 
click here, or right click app for source
Naturally, the number of Planes makes it more or less impossible to animate the camera with an EnterFrame or so… It’s still cool to see the camera move around using direction keys. Perhaps with Seb Lee-Delisle’s frame by frame movie generator thingy-ma-bob…
Oh yeah, you’ll probably need a decent screen resolution for this… I didn’t bother optimize, for those screen challenged readers, I apologize.
Just good ol’ E4X.
. It was as2 and some “custom 3d” (lol). Customized snowflakes has been done before by others (can’t find links), 
The project was sold, with the premise of reskinning the old app, but it quickly became apparent that rebuilding from scratch using a more modern approach would be faster. (How things change in just two years!? 
