Swingpant's Game Lab

I have been playing with the awesome Away3DLite. Playing with 1000s of polygons is very liberating, but still doesn’t mean we can slack off with the optimisation. It is important to take any opportunity to lessen the number of calculations performed per frame by the player.

To this end, I was just putting together a 2D layer above my 3D scene when I found that the camera.screen function (available in the standard Away3D library) that projects 3D coordinates(x,y,z) to 2D screen positions (x,y) wasn’t present.

In Away3DLite we have to calculate this ourselves. The salient information can be gained through a model or container’s viewMatrix3D property. To get an accurate screen position the the x,y,and z positions are drawn from viewMatrix3D. Each of x and y are divided by the z value and any screen offsets are applied.

Here is the method as a function:

public function calc2DCoords(screen_element:*):Point
{

var posn:Vector3D = screen_element.viewMatrix3D.position
var screenX:Number = posn.x / posn.z;
var screenY:Number = posn.y / posn.z;

return new Point(screenX+screenW_offset,screenY+screeH_offset)
}

Pass through a screen element (a model, primitive or object container) and the 2D result will be returned. The screenW_offset and screenH_offset are required if the ‘view’ has been centred on the stage.

I have put together a demo here to demonstrate the function. I load a couple of models into the scene and let a 2D info panel follow each around the screen.

Got to keep a close eye on those tubbies

Demo: Translating 3D Coordinates to 2D Screen Position
Source: ZIP