Flash CS4 Spherical Panorama (animating uvtData)

Intro
Creating a CS4 Panorama has a unique twist - literally! You actually don’t rotate the primitive but you animate its texture, using the following code snippet:

public function step(moveU:Number, moveV:Number=0.0):void {
for (var i=0; i<uvtData.length; i+=2) {
uvtData[i++] -= moveU;
uvtData[i] += moveV;
// each loop i increases by 3 because skiping over the t-coordinate
}
}

The uvtData is easily animated just by skipping through correct U or V values of the uvtData vector and adding a small increment. Click on the image below to see the web demo.

Demo
Source
Book Blog Post

As in the previous Super Prim post, Petri Leskinen’s great work on Pixelero http://pixelero.wordpress.com/ was key to this creation. He demonstrates an animated tube which with a little work I was able to turn into this panorama. The code is encapsulated and very closely resembles the OOP regimentation of Papervision3D.

If you want to learn how to make spherical pano images check out the following YouTube links by Amanda Verette (one of my graphic designers):

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfkLQ93Uey0
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhjuSIzLXCE
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKpVboahayg

Parts 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are still in production.