Two Really Cool Avalon 3D Applets

  • Article

If you've got Avalon Beta 1 RC installed on your machine now (and if not, why not?!), you'll enjoy both of these two applets that have been written by colleagues of mine:

  • Avalon 3D File System Visualizer by Steve White from the Premier Support group in the UK. This is a really impressive visualization of a file system, and shows how Avalon can be used to add value to any data intensive application.
    Update: it's not immediately clear how to manipulate the 3D objects here. Steve comments: "By default, mouse manipulation is inactive for a viewport. In order to toggle into and out of mouse manipulation mode, use Ctrl+right mouse button. Once in mouse manipulation mode, if you depress both left and right mouse buttons whilst moving the mouse you will pan the scene. If you depress only the right mouse button whilst moving the mouse you will zoom the camera. If you don’t depress either button then you will effectively rotate the entire scene (lights and all). The rotation is actually achieved by moving the camera over the surface of an imaginary sphere. Up/down mouse motion affects the camera’s latitude (clamped to the range [0,180]), and left/right mouse motion affects the camera’s longitude."
  • 3D Channel 9 Guy by Adam Kinney, who's just joined our team as a Channel 9 developer, and has been experimenting with ZAM 3D (a 3D modelling tool that outputs XAML). Great stuff!

Have fun!