Today, I’ve spent the entire morning fixing a strange error in a Flash Project with Away3D. Every now and then, it would give me the following error: Error #2007: Parameter bitmap must be non-null. It would give the error when calling the render function of the view.
The strange thing is that it would never give the error when running in debug mode, making it very hard to find the cause of the error. Eventually, I found that Away3D is not very fond of objects with alpha set to 0. Setting it to 0.01 made all the errors magically disappear. For me, this is fine, but I can imagine scenario’s where this is not a suitable work-around, so I’ve also reported it to the away3d devvers.

I’ve updated my 3d text component a bit, performance should now be a bit better. Furthermore, you can now choose any font you’ve installed on your system (just to prove that they are real fonts). See it in action:

Ow and by the way: right click to see the source and find out how it’s done.

The source seems to be fucked up, here’s the relevant code: http://experiments.flexperiments.nl/3dtext2/srcview/source/experiments/flexperiments/text3d/Text3dFXApp.as.html

The other day, I was playing with the away 3D engine and I discovered that you can have 3D text. It’s really cool, look at this:

Cool huh? You can change the text by altering the text in the input field (topleft corner). I’ll be tweaking this little thingy a bit further to increase the performance.

Fabrice, our mad french scientist @ TFE just released this fabulous demo of their 3D engine. Way to go, Fab-man!

Check it out here: http://www.closier.nl/blog/?p=77