ryan: January 2008 Archives

I've been experimenting with the Papervision3D 2.0 (Great White) lately, and I must say I am impressed with the new features.  Particularly cool is the ability to add shaders.  This makes it much easier to create realistic models with higher quality textures and lower polygon counts.  I created a quick golf ball demo to highlight the possibilities.  The scene includes a point light, and a phong shader combining the texture and bump map applied to the sphere.  If you look closely, you can see the light reflecting off the edges of the ball as it rotates. 

Controls:  Arrow keys zoom in / out, pan around.  Mouse wheel zooms.

Click to interact

With the dawn of AS3, design patterns are beginning to achieve popularity in ActionScript development.  I am compiling a list of AS3 examples, which there are surprisingly few of online.  It can be just as easy though to look at C# and Java examples on wikipedia, but it's still nice to see things in ActionScript.  Also, check out books  listed below.  I use them for reference myself.

Creational:

• Singleton
• Factory
• Builder

Structural:

• Composite
• Flyweight
• Decorator (PDF)

Books:

• Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns (Paperback)
• ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software