Kore Nordmann has made a post on his blog with more details on the Image_3D package and some of the rendering times he noticed (and the improvements) with the Zend Guard product.

According to his results, the Zend Guard optimizer actually dropped the effectiveness and speed of rendering an image with his package - up to a 30% drop!

Kore Nordmann has made a post on his blog with more details on the Image_3D package and some of the rendering times he noticed (and the improvements) with the Zend Guard product.

According to his results, the Zend Guard optimizer actually dropped the effectiveness and speed of rendering an image with his package - up to a 30% drop!

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a tutorial covering the generation of 3D Images inside PHP - with the help of the Image_3D PEAR package, of course.

PHP, a language originally intended for Web development, has been used for years to manage dynamic Web sites and database applications. Extensions to the language available through the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) have allowed developers to take the language in new and interesting directions.

PEAR's Image_3D package is an object-oriented interface for creating three-dimensional (3-D) graphics in a variety of formats, including PNG and SVG, two image formats with increasing support by modern Web browsers. Find out how to use the Image_3D package, learn the limitations of using dynamic 3-D images, and investigate solutions and practical applications of 3-D graphics.

You'll have to log in to get at the actual tutorial, but it's full of good info and code to get you started. You'll need a bit of knowledge of object-oriented programming to really get a handle on it, and a shell prompt (Windows or Linux) will be needed to run some of the examples.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a tutorial covering the generation of 3D Images inside PHP - with the help of the Image_3D PEAR package, of course.

PHP, a language originally intended for Web development, has been used for years to manage dynamic Web sites and database applications. Extensions to the language available through the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) have allowed developers to take the language in new and interesting directions.

PEAR's Image_3D package is an object-oriented interface for creating three-dimensional (3-D) graphics in a variety of formats, including PNG and SVG, two image formats with increasing support by modern Web browsers. Find out how to use the Image_3D package, learn the limitations of using dynamic 3-D images, and investigate solutions and practical applications of 3-D graphics.

You'll have to log in to get at the actual tutorial, but it's full of good info and code to get you started. You'll need a bit of knowledge of object-oriented programming to really get a handle on it, and a shell prompt (Windows or Linux) will be needed to run some of the examples.

Kore Nordman has been making even further advancements in the development behind the PEAR Image_3D library - this time, he looks at raytracing in PHP.

I was always writing, that implementing a raytracer (or the better german description) in PHP would be far to slow. And then, two days ago, I had the feeling I should prove this ... this was also the way Image_3D was born. With the infrastructure Image_3D offers, all the existing models, the abstraction etc. it wasn't such a big thing. You mainly need to write a short algorithm which gets the intersection point for a polygon with a line, and that's it. For sure, you should optimze the algorithm a bit. And it is really fun to implement such a simple mathematical model like raytracing is.

He talks about some of the problems that raytracers don't have that normal renderers do (shadows, reflections, etc) and notes that the images display in the post took about seven minutes to render on his system. He proved that it can work, but notes that it supports his original hypothesis - rendering like this with PHP is just too slow.

Kore Nordman has been making even further advancements in the development behind the PEAR Image_3D library - this time, he looks at raytracing in PHP.

I was always writing, that implementing a raytracer (or the better german description) in PHP would be far to slow. And then, two days ago, I had the feeling I should prove this ... this was also the way Image_3D was born. With the infrastructure Image_3D offers, all the existing models, the abstraction etc. it wasn't such a big thing. You mainly need to write a short algorithm which gets the intersection point for a polygon with a line, and that's it. For sure, you should optimze the algorithm a bit. And it is really fun to implement such a simple mathematical model like raytracing is.

He talks about some of the problems that raytracers don't have that normal renderers do (shadows, reflections, etc) and notes that the images display in the post took about seven minutes to render on his system. He proved that it can work, but notes that it supports his original hypothesis - rendering like this with PHP is just too slow.

Kore Nordmann has been making great strides on his Image_3D PEAR package and now, with some help from his brother, the package can display the images created as SVG images in a browser. Additionally, this post mentions the inclusion of "subdivision surfaces" to smooth images rendered.

This one enables you to display the threedimensional scenes created by Image_3D in your browser as a SVG. Plus you get several buttons to modify the SVG directly in your browser. For now you can move and zoom the scene - but there will be some more transformations in the near future.

The "subdivision surfaces" (adding more polygons to a surface) helps to create a smoother look to the image and has been implemented by Kore. Using it is a simple matter of calling the subdivideSurfaces() function on your object with the detail level you want.

You can check out samples of both of these enhancements on Kore's blog.

Kore Nordmann has been making great strides on his Image_3D PEAR package and now, with some help from his brother, the package can display the images created as SVG images in a browser. Additionally, this post mentions the inclusion of "subdivision surfaces" to smooth images rendered.

This one enables you to display the threedimensional scenes created by Image_3D in your browser as a SVG. Plus you get several buttons to modify the SVG directly in your browser. For now you can move and zoom the scene - but there will be some more transformations in the near future.

The "subdivision surfaces" (adding more polygons to a surface) helps to create a smoother look to the image and has been implemented by Kore. Using it is a simple matter of calling the subdivideSurfaces() function on your object with the detail level you want.

You can check out samples of both of these enhancements on Kore's blog.

Kore Nordmann has released the latest edition of his PEAR Image_3D package - version 0.4-alpha - including some great new features.

The new release of Image_3D (0.4-alpha) is out. It was quite some time ago, Richard Davey wrote his great introduction into Image_3D. He asked for some different types of lights, I didn't thought of, when I released Image_3D first. This needed a minor change in the API you use to create lights, but offers some great improvements. See changelog for details.

Some of the other additions mentioned include, as mentioned, the ability to create different types of lights (light, ambient, point, and spotlight) and the inclusion of an object that allows for the creation of bezier areas from an array of points.

Kore Nordmann has released the latest edition of his PEAR Image_3D package - version 0.4-alpha - including some great new features.

The new release of Image_3D (0.4-alpha) is out. It was quite some time ago, Richard Davey wrote his great introduction into Image_3D. He asked for some different types of lights, I didn't thought of, when I released Image_3D first. This needed a minor change in the API you use to create lights, but offers some great improvements. See changelog for details.

Some of the other additions mentioned include, as mentioned, the ability to create different types of lights (light, ambient, point, and spotlight) and the inclusion of an object that allows for the creation of bezier areas from an array of points.