Chapter 12. 3D Vector Drawing and Text

Papervision3D is mainly bitmap based, meaning all that is rendered is converted to bitmaps. Rendering crisp and smooth looking text is quite a challenge when using this approach, as we have seen in the MovieAssetMaterial example in Chapter 4. Rendering text directly as vector shapes may offer a good alternative. There are two reasons for this:

• Bitmaps are resolution dependent, and scaling them could lead to a decreasing image quality. Vector shapes are scalable without loss of quality.

• It is hard to wrap text on triangles that are skewed and still make it look good. 3D vector text is not drawn on triangles in order to be rendered.

Papervision3D features a set of classes that allow for drawing vector graphics such as simple shapes and text. The method names that are used for drawing shapes are similar to those of the Flash drawing API such as lineTo() and curveTo(). Creating 3D text is also fairly simple because of a couple of easy-to-use classes.

The...