Stage3D…Molehill…is almost out after months of beta. This time I want to publish some Stage3D demo that is a bit more complex than a simple square.

Now let me give you some background. Our office is in Florence, Italy. We are lucky, and from our office window we have an amazing view of the famous Duomo of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore. It’s so close that it feels like we can almost touch it. Take a look at the photo above for a view from our office window.

Now that Molehill is coming out, it’s time for Flash to show! 3D is finally coming to the web, in Flash, in the form of Stage3D. And I wanted to be part of it, by displaying something that is symbolic of my town.

Ok, where’s the meat?

Let’s see the result of this demo I’ve been working on.

The model is not mine of course. It was made by Google SketchUp superstar Arrigo Silva (Enrico Dalbosco), who re-created this wonder of a church in Google SketchUp here. Arrigo kindly allowed me to use his amazing 3D model for this demo.

And here is the Stage3D virtual tour of Santa Maria del Fiore.

(Click to launch. Note, requires Flash Player 11. Firefox users on Mac, please update to latest version of browser.)

How was that created?

Poly wise, the model, although amazing, is not that complex. It’s about 27000 triangles. However it’s finely detailed as it consists of 374 textured sub-meshes. Frame rate for me is about 60 fps

I’m displaying it with a very simple 3D model viewer that we’ve developed that uses a lighting Shader, with a single point light. A similar viewer could be easily made with a Stage3D engine, like Away3D.

But the interesting part is that I created the model file starting from the Collada file of Arrigo’s model from Google SketchUp here, using a tool that we’ve been developing internally, that can import a 3D model file, and export a Flash ready file to be used in a Stage3D application. This tool can create a 3D Library file containing one or more 3D models that are optimized, compressed, and in a format that is ready to be used with Stage3D.

The cool thing is that, with this tool, it took me a total of 4.5 minutes to create this demo. I just downloaded Arrigo’s model from Google SketchUp 3D Warehouse, imported into the tool, and exported for Stage3D. That’s it!

Want to know more?

Me and my team developed this tool for internal use but we may release it at some point if there’s enough interest. Just let me know if this kind of thing interests you. You can leave a comment below, or use the contact form here.

Filed under: Flash 3D Demos

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