I need to get up to speed with Papervision - I've been thru the tutorials here:

http://papervision2.com/tutorial-list/

and they were good, but I need more!

Can anyone recommend any other resources?

One aim I have is to break up an image, say a photo of room, so that it ends up as various layers - creating a parallax effect as you move the camera left and right. I've created something quick and dirty using PNGs with transparency - but can I add irregular shaped planes?

http://www.danwashere.com/dev/papervision/asturian_cows.html

iregular use a transparent material as you have (layers of transparency heavy) or import a collada file or use several planes, You could use triangle to make irregular shapes but like I say collada with 3d package should be simpler. papervision is quite heavy and is over kill for parrallex which you can just use a ratio for (ie landrover 60th).

check through nabbles it achives the papervision email list and has a search. Check blogs of people like john grden, andy zupko, xero, etc.

look up layers and useOwnContainer and effects, heightmaps (gradints that define z height ) are really cool (but dont try to mod the standard plane as only z so it goes screwy and shading does not work) did some stuff with a face recently and tweening heightmaps trick is to calculate alternte coordnates when init creating.

rem to turn render off when you can. pre-copy your own bitmaps and store them as an array and set directly on material can run faster than real time movematerial ie for alphas. Don't know collada side of it much an area I need to learn.

make sure you use viewport, and if not using basicview make sure you set render view size.

I tend to handle loading movies/jpg,s myself and use standard bitmap or movie materials.

for two sided like text try two planes its often simpler. if you have a hard boundary ie text and image split it in two planes to keep straight edge also long thin tiling suits a label and less tiles needed on an image.

shadeing is heavy pre-bake shadows in 3d package.

swap planes visible or materials bitmap can be the fastest low overhead for buttons

look at john's component tut for more interactive knowledge, but faking mouse interaction with invisible 2d clips can be better, as a vertial mouse is continuous mouse pos converted to 3d corrdinates and hittest for highest against all!

change smoothing setting depending on plane position

you can use more than one papervision and it means you can have a background with render turned off for instance.

if you have a 3d nav where some parts get really small swap them for simpler model or hide them as it will really make a difference.

not sure how usefull my suggestions are you prob already know as much as me, but worth trying to understand principles under bonnet so that you can optimise and be willing to hack/mod, and create your own bitmaps etc...

thanks for all the tips and thoughts there JLM.

I'm just practicing here, so I've created this parallax thing as a test, but it is sort of aimed towards a future project I'll be making with any luck. There'll be more to it than just this of course.

I'll start another thread with specific questions...