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Using Sandy 3D Flash Library Thursday 2006-09-21

I was always very excited about 3D images, and the possibility of creating my own. I’ve been involved in holography in the physics lab at the University of Linköping, and written small C programs to present rotating 3D objects. When the Internet and the web hit me in the mid 90’s, I started to hand code or draw WRML worlds with a plethora of authoring tools, from Notepad to Caligari True Space, presenting them using the Cosmo Player and different Java Applets.

Since it all started, lots of things have happened and yet we are seemingly always back to square one. Great projects fail to really catch on and new attempts at creating standardized file formats pops up all the time. Proprietary file formats and expensive authoring tools hampers the swift expansion of 3D on the web. In later years, the Flash player has been the target of 3D development, and we have tools for creating 3D scenes for Flash. From a programmers perspective, Macromedia has step by step developed Actionscript, the ECMA derivative, into a full blown programming language, object oriented and with a good event handling system.

When I was involved with Sean in the development of the Flickr Spinner, I hoovered the Net for true 3D libraries written in Actionscript, and I found quite a few. One that immediately caught my attention, was the Sandy 3D API by Thomas Pfeiffer, an object oriented Actionscript library, for writing and manipulating 3D worlds. As most other modern description of 3D worlds, it has a DOM or tree model, where all geometric objects, transformations and materials are grouped into nodes. It has a global coordinate system and sports a camera within the world, that can be translated and rotated relative to global coordinates or to its own local coordinate system. the user sees the world through this camera. The camera can be manipulated as any real world camera and may be animated through functions in the library.

To learn how all this works, and to introduce Sandy to others who fancy 3D programming, I have started a tutorial series called “Using Sandy 3D Flash Library“.
Take part, experiment and enjoy!

• Posted in : Flash 3D
• Author : Petit