[Papervision3D] Questions, requests, suggestions, reports, etc...

[Clox]

Hello
Is this the right place to ask questions regarding Papervision and get in
touch with the authors and such? =)


I've been using Papervision for a while and I'm really starting to like it,
there's a few things really bugging me though.

I just want to say that even I'll "complain" about a couple things I think
Papervision is awesome, great job =)

I think I have to say the thing bugging me the most is the clipping, which
looks really bad once an object gets anywhere close another one.
I found this benchmarktest which compares the clipping of PaperVision3D,
Away3D, Sandy, and Alternativa 3D. Sandy and Alternativa wins that test.
Everything would be a lot better if it wasn't for this issue.
So I guess I'm just wanting to know if this will be fixed anytime soon?

My next point is about shaders. I always use them in my Papervision
projects, but they are quite CPU heavy, i feel this could be improved a lot.
The shades recalculate for every render, and so far for my projects, I've
never even needed that.
I might have a few meshes with ColorMaterial, and I want to shade them to
make them look better.
Or i might have a bumpy ground mesh or such, which I want to give more depth
to so that the slopes can easily be seen. 
In these cases I've always had the lightsource really, really far away and
so redrawing the shades is a real waste.

I did come up with a solution for this.
What I do is giving an object a shade-material, turn of cullings, render the
object, then grab its output bitmap with material.getOutputBitmapDataFor and
use it for a regular bitmap-material which i assign to the object.

This *significantly* improves the performance. And it even makes it look
better as well, since it gets rid of the artifacts shaders tend to cause,
e.g. the black lines that appears along edges.
Doesn't exactly seem like a great solution though.
Plus, sometimes I might want to move a few vertices on my mesh, or I might
even have a scrollable mesh which only loads in certain parts at a time, and
in that case I have to reassign a shadematerial, render it in order to
reshade the *whole* mesh, grab the output and finally assign it to the mesh
again.This is my issue for my current project.

So what I'm "asking" for here, is a way of updating shading on certain parts
of a mesh only.
And preferably a better way of "turning off" recalculations for shading on
every render.

Those things are the 2 main-problems I'm having.
Also, there's a couple bugs(I think?) when setting the yUp of a camera to
false.
The backface-culler-order gets reversed, which I think it isn't supposed to.
Like If the camera is inside a skybox, which is a primitive.cube that's
flipped, turning off yUp makes the box face out and ill have to un-flip it.
I really want to have it on false for my current project, and flipping the
faces for all my meshes isn't something I'd love to do. Partly because I've
written a few algorithms which does calculations on tris and which depend on
tri-winding
What I did was editing a couple of papervision files, so that
DefaultTriangleCuller.as checks wheter yUp is true or false, and invert the
backfaceculling.
Another problem a false yUp causes is that it inverses the y of
camera.unproject(x,y), so i have to give a negative y for the second
parameter.

Also, I'm just wondering about animations.
Is there a good way of doing morph(vertex) animations?
The way I can think of is to render models in different poses, keep all the
data for the first one, but for the following ones only keep the positions
of the vertices. store them somewhere and then tween each vertex
accordingly. Quite a hassle though and I have to manually extract the
vertex-positions from the files.

Bone-animations... It would be so sweet if they were around. Will it be
implemented anytime soon? I'd *love* that...

Okay, I think that's all I can think of right now, this message is getting
quite long anyway.

*Great* work with papervision =)

And thanks in advance for any reply =)
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