Monday, September 22nd, 2008
So, after a few problems with my old blogger account I’ve finally moved to this new address : blog.tartiflop.com!
Its not been as straight-forward as I was hoping for so sorry for the delay since my last First Steps post… but promise, the next one shouldn’t be too far away! Thanks for all the encouragement I’ve been getting over the last few weeks… its been a real surprise and I’m really happy that people have found these posts useful…
Anyway, hope there’s no problems with the change in address… but of course there’s been quite a bit of work necessary to get all the links altered correctly so if you do find anything wrong just drop me a line.
As I mentioned before, the next First Steps post should be along soon… see you hopefully before the end of the month!
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
Having developed over the last few years a number of 3D applications using OpenGL in both C++ and Java, I recently wondered what the possibilities were in producing a web-based application. Obviously OpenGL has an advantage of being hardware accelerated so my initial thoughts on this were rather pessimistic : how can software rendering produce anything comparable ? …
… within a few minutes of searching on the web my opinion was totally changed.
Ok, so maybe its too early to assume that calculation-intensive applications such as 3D games or data visualisation are going to become web applications - after all, these rely heavily on (and are designed in light of) hardware processing power - but 3D animation and effects can be reproduced using a number of Actionscript-based libraries providing some impressive and beautiful sites. Here are just a few commercial sites using 3D techniques that caught my attention just to give you an idea…
From a number of Actionscript libraries (*) available for producing 3D Flash applications (including Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy3D and Alternativa3D) I’ve decided to concentrate on Papervision3D (or pv3d). A number of posts on the web seem to imply that it is good in performance compared to other 3D engines and there seems to be a large number of demos illustrating its capabilities… Mr.doob’s blog, for example, has a very impressive list. Having said that, I have tried Sandy3D as well. I was impressed by the documentation and tutorials - getting started using this library is very rapid and very well explained. Pv3d, by comparison, is trickier to setup and get started with… acutally, having said that, maybe that’s just because I went straight for the v2.0 (or Great White as its code-named) which isn’t officially released yet ! I guess I have some kind of predeliction for doing things the hard way…
Anyway, all that’s just a build up to explain why I started this blog. I’m new to both Actionscript and Papervision3D and have had a lot of fun over the last couple of weeks getting started and making my first 3D Flash applications. I’ve found a lot of useful sites along the way and just wanted to regroup this information so that maybe it’ll be useful for others too.
(* actually at the time of writing this I’ve just seen that Adobe is releasing native 3D support in the new Flash Player 10)
