Written by Paul Tondeur and Jeff Winder, from Packt Publishing, also available from
Amazon; ISBN 9781847195722. Probably should have been titled The Missing Manual if that hadn’t already been taken. Interesting that it took two Dutchmen to come up with a book in English, published in England, indicative Papervision3D’s international activity.

Learning how to use 3D in Flash and Flex can be daunting. The open source Papervision3D offers the potential of accomplishing some great things, quickly and easily, but the learning curve is steep, involving a lot of trials and, usually, more than a few errors. As with many such things, Papervision3D is a marvel from a development community whose technical strengths are not matched by any clear writing ability. Paul Tondeur and Jeff Winder have addressed this with their recently released Papervision3D Essentials, from Packt Publications. The first such work in lucid English, its 394 pages are organized in thirteen well written chapters, starting with the basics and progressively broadening the foundations in related aspects, such as shading and modeling. Included here and there, almost causally, are productivity enhancing tips and tricks that many seasoned and experienced Flash/Flex many not know exist. Chapter One has to be particularly commended, which plainly, clearly and simply details the steps to setup the Papervision3D environments for Flash, Flash Builder and Flex Builder, and includes a test program that helps validate the setup. Each chapter has detailed example project code, again for both Flash and Flex Builder. The examples are written in Action Script 3; those still using AS2 may have some problems in getting up to speed. This is an excellent starter book for learning how to use Papervision3D, with the examples and discussions left to expand into more complex and interactive development by the reader. Highly recommended.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: 3D programming, action script, Flash, flex, interactive web design, papervision3d, ria, rich internet applications

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