Making things walk in Flash 3D

An Actionscript-based 3D bone system is something I wanted to do for a long time, but I couldn't figure out how to approach this problem for several months. A few days ago, I finally made a breakthrough.

Here's a first demo I quickly put together: a 3D walk cycle.

So far the only way to have a walking character in Flash 3D was to create an animation sequence in a 3D editor and export it as an animated DAE and/or use Cast3D. For sure, this method allows to achieve awesome results, but it is not nearly as flexible as being able to control the animation directly from Actionscript.

So, how does the above demo work? First of all I created a model of pants in Blender. This is the 4th model I ever did with Blender so it not perfect, but is good enough for the job. The important part is that both legs and the waist form a single mesh.

After I imported the model into Papervision3D I applied several Break modifiers to the model. The Break modifier is a new class I wrote for AS3Dmod and is of key importance for this demo. In brief, it allows to apply rotation only to a group of vertices while leaving the rest untouched. The resulting deformation makes the mesh look like it was broken, hence the name.

I created a modifier stack and added 4 Break modifiers to the pants. One for each tight, and one for each knee. The angle for each of them can be modified separately, which allows dynamic animation.

You probably wonder how I did indicate which vertices belong to which part of the mesh (waist, thigh, calf) and how I even know where those parts start or end on the code level. That is crucial in creating an armature and it is also the tricky part. Most of the 3D IDEs, like 3Dsmax or Blender have some kind of visual interface that allows the user to select vertices and attach them to a bone. In AS everything is code, so this is a challenge. I must confess that for this demo I hardcoded some values and did some assumptions to make it work, but I think there is a way to make this task relatively easy or at least possible to apprehend.

In the long run, it would be cool if bones could be exported from 3D IDEs and exposed as objects in Actionscript. As far as I know, there isn't anything like this available for the moment. Away3D supports collada bone animation but, despite its promising name, it serves a different purpose (correct me if I am wrong.)

Let's go back to the demo. Once I had the Break modifiers in place and applied to the correct areas of the mesh, the rest was rather easy. To create a proper walk cycle, I just took Keith Peters' book "Making Things Move", Chapter 13 on Forward Kinematics, and I adapted the code from the examples.

In case you don't know that book, I would strongly recommend getting it. It contains all the essential stuff you need to know, if you want to call yourself a serious AS3 developer. I never leave home without it! There is also a sequel, with stuff for Flash Player 10.

This walk cycle is only a first step to create a bone system in AS, but I wanted to share it with you without spending another few months making it fully featured. Break modifier is available in the latest AS3Dmod SVN repository. I should warn you however that this is a very early version, not really usable for the moment.

Of course, updates are coming so stay tuned!