Blogs

At the Shebeen Room. Be there!

Quick snippet, having fun with dates.


require 'rubygems'
require 'activesupport'

date_range.each { |e| puts e }


This past weekend James and I had the pleasure of taking in some Papervision3D training.

Papervision3D, for the uninitiated, is a full fledged 3D engine in ActionScript 3. Its blazing fast and totally sweet.

John Grden is a great teacher and, as a result, the course was very approachable for programmer and designer alike. He was careful to ensure everyone was working at the same pace and no one was left behind. His descriptions where clear and whenever in doubt he pointed out additional resources for our own study outside the class.

Day one was high level, API and capability overview. Quick demos of the overall Papervision architecture, history and direction.

Day two was deeper, looking into the more advanced capabilities and getting us to code for ourselves. Animation, interactivity, effects, colladas and performance tuning. I had a little trouble getting Flex Builder to play nice but after some gentle coaxing I was able to create an extremely rudimentary demo, by hand, with no trouble.

Papervision is an impressive platform. The potential for creating an innovative user experience is there from enhancing your existing RIA with some simple effects to full blown game development. Not to mention a 3D AIR application. I found the API to be very approachable once I understood the concepts behind the library.

I’m looking forward to building something a little more substantial with it … soon! Until then, here’s some resources:

Main site:
http://blog.papervision3d.org/

Documentation:
http://www.papervision3d.org/docs/as3/

Developers blog:
http://dev.papervision3d.org/

Mailing list:
http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/Papervision3D_osflash.org