{ P I X E L W E L D E R S }

ASIDE: So, the original theme of this article was a head to head between PV3D/VectorVision and FIVe3D, but then I realized that an offspring metaphor was really more apt, as explained below. Nonetheless, the following picture is too awesome not to use.

An awesome picture.

If you’ve been following this site for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with Mathieu Badimon’s excellent FIVe3D engine. Probably too much time, in fact. I’ve talked about the features in other posts, so I won’t go into it here. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, go take a look at Mathieu’s examples, or click ‘FIVe3D’ in the tag cloud to the right to see what it is and some of the things it’s capable of.

It seems that the first thing people do when they see this engine is compare it with Papervision3D. I’ve resisted this for a long time; in my opinion, bitmap-based and vector-based 3D engines seem to be pretty close to the proverbial apples and oranges. However! As of sometime last week, Papervision and FIVe3D have been combined into some sort of (proverbial?) fruit punch, which means that inter-species comparisons make a lot more sense. It’s called VectorVision, and the men responsible for this unholy union are Barcinski & Jean-Jean, two mad scientists from Amsterdam.

Based on my earlier experiments, I’ve been kicking around the idea of a 3D tag cloud for this blog. FIVe3D, of course, seemed like the obvious man for the job due to its simplicity and the fact that Papervision hasn’t had anything in the way of quality text rendering. However, the experiments of the aforementioned Dutchmen made me wonder how Papervision would handle the task. So, I created a similar application using each library. You can see the results below; each image is a separate SWF- just click one to activate it.

Findings

As you can see, there are some differences; and of course, this is as basic as either engine gets. But in terms of pure capability, it looks like the offspring of PV3D and FIVe3D is indeed greater than either. Post your machine/browser and frame rates; I’d like to see what everyone else is getting.