I am happy to announce that TheCoronaBeach.com, my first site that I worked on at Big Spaceship is now a finalist for this years Flash In The Can Awards.
It was challenging to creating one big 3d environment that includes a lot of interactive objects, integrates seemlessly with other parts of the site and still provides a fluid user experience and broadcast quality imagery throughout the whole website. We used Papervision3D to create the enormous beach environment in which you can pan left/right/up/down. The background is a huge texture mapped on a custom sphere, created in cinema4d and converted into a collada file with the help of blender. The key was to add the (interactive) objects partly within the pv3d scene, partly as a normal 2d-movieclip on a new layer on top of it. For every 2D-Movieclip we added a new DisplayObject3D to the scene whose screen-x/y/z position is used to change the position and scale of the 2d-Movieclip.
So all the 3d movement could be easily controlled within papervision3d.
Most complicated features:
Integration of a huge wave/shore-video that completely runs within papervision and doesn’t kill the framerate of the site. Dragging down the sun to change the environment into a night scene. Draw into the Sand!
Go explore the Site and please vote here if you like it.
thanks.