In order to build a complex scenery and keep it low poly, you need to have good 3D skills and a good modeller. For many that's just too much to ask. As a result, I read threads everyday, on lists and forums, on how to load those elephant xml files...
I think it's just bad practice to build whole scenes that way, specially when it comes to Flash.
And here comes the problem:
What else?
Personally I think that's one the biggest challenges, offering tools that helps to reduce loading problems and offer more flexibility to the way we work.
So here's my first contribution in that direction, this demo shows one of the classes I'm working on.
The class allows you to create extrudes from points, like a fence around a house, walls, a city block, charts elevation, some surrounding forest, sky trips or ... a maze! You can define elevation on 3 axis, thickness, add one or more materials per segments, be able to generate one mesh from one or more point definitions, subdivisions per segments so you can control the polygon count, be able to decide if texture(s) covers whole geometry or per segments, you can hide some sides...
Last but not least, this option costed me almost a total rewrite of the class: it respects the thickness no matter the angle of the next segment.
Here is a 2d representation of the algorithm.

And here a little random generator.

Of course one class is not enough... so more are coming!


January 18th, 2008 at 8:24 am
cool! i love this :D, i’m with you keep going
January 18th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Brilliant as usual!
January 18th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
amazing! both teams have been talking about extrude functions for a while now… its very cool to see someone pull it off, and so well! very nice fab!
and tossing the minotaur into the labyrinth was a nice touch!
January 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Excellent!
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:21 am
excellent fabrice !
January 25th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Wow, amazing.
August 16th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Where i can find a source code for this article?