How to program a carousel?

[pluviosilla]

I would like to program a 3D representation of a carousel of photo images. Anyone know where I can find the mathematical formulas for that? The carousel is rotating about a central axis, obviously, but you also have to make each individual photo (or slide) rotate about its axis in a way that is dependent on the rotation of the carousel.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Hack]

Welcome to the forums.

What programming language will you be using?

[pluviosilla]

Probably just Flash / FLEX and Papervision3D.

[CADman]

I will use VB as an example but the approach may work in many languages. Let's say you have 12 'horses' on the carousel. You will need to use image boxes as they have a stretch capability. Make the outer images fairly thin and widen them as they approach the center of the carousel. It would look something like:
.. .... ...... ...... .... ..
It will take a little math to move them across the screen while adjusting their widths. When one image becomes nearly zero width make it invisible and move the next image into place at the other end. There will be some distortion of the image but that may be acceptable for your purpose.

Cadman

[pluviosilla]

Thanks much for taking time to reply. Did you embed some images in your post? I don't see either code or images?

[CADman]

What it wrote was pseudocode or a method to consider as an approach to solve the problem. I don't know Flash / FLEX or Papervision3D but those languages may have similar controls that mimic VB. This sounds like an interesting photo display. Give it a go and if you get stuck then post your problem.

Cadman

[Paul M]

This is basically my understanding of what you need, you need to billboard the images quite frankly. So you basically rotate them to continuously face the camera. Here is an example image...



So load them into the 3D environment then rotate them to face the camera. Since you are using Flash this concept of billboarding might not apply, i am not familiar with Flash so sorry.