The book starts of with a fairly in-depth introduction into how to get started with Away3D by teaching you how to check out the library using SVN, get it set up in Flash Builder or Flash CS4 and even covers using FlashDevelop. The book then moves on to explain the basic components of the Away3D engine such as Camera3D, Scene3D & View3D. It even provides you with a basic template class to get you started ASAP.

Once you’ve mastered this step, the next thing covered is basic 3D concepts like 3D positioning, vertices, faces, coordinates and primitive shapes. A basic explanation of all the primitives available in Away3D is given and what properties can be applied to them.

With this mastered the next chapter covers moving 3D objects in 3D space. Coordinates systems are covered including explanations of world, parent and local space (each with code examples) and other functions such as the moveForward/Backward/etc() functions are covered. Then tweening with library’s such as TweenLite is covered. When you have finished this chapter you’ll be completely familiar with all the animation methods the Away3D library offers you to manipulate and animate objects in you scene.

The next topic covered is z-sorting and has an entire chapter dedicated to it. This covers the default method of z-sorting that Away3D uses, an in-depth explanation of how your 3D scene is sorted, how to edit and adjust the sorting of 3D objects and what additional renderers are offered by Away3D.

After this the extensive subject of Materials is covered. All the different types of materials such as WireframeMaterial, AnimatedBitmapMaterial and many others are covered, as well as the Pixel Bender based ones such as the Dot3BitmapMaterialF10. Different kinds of mapping such as texture and environment are covered and also a brief explanation and code sample of how to apply each different material.  A useful table of all the supported colours and what materials support what lighting techniques is provided.

Models & Animation is the next topic covered with an introduction to loading 3D models in to your scene, what different file types are supported and a brief explanation on how to export models in certain 3D packages. An explanation of what types of cameras are available, their differences and effects as well as mouse interactivity.

After this mouse interactivity, 3D text, special effects and performance issues are covered. Each chapter following the same as the ones already mentioned with a good selection of code samples provided and an in-depth explanation. Overall this book gives you everything you need to get started with the Away3D engine, and the good thing is it can be used by people who are already familiar with Away3D but what to learn more. A good understanding of Actionscript 3 is obviously required, but I highly recommend this book the anyone looking to get a good understanding of Away3D.

Starting on the 19th of July and lasting for five weeks, I got the opportunity to do some work experience at AKQA London. This was a simply brilliant experience, filled with opportunities to understand and experience how the new media industry operates, from attending client workshops to doing work for some pretty awesome clients.

On my first day, nerves were running considerably high. Seeing as I had never before been in an industry environment I had no idea what to expect, whether I would just be given a brief and told to get on with it or just be left cleaning desks and doing milk-shake runs, but either way it was going to be awesome to be back up at AKQA after two years. Making it there finally after a quick sprint up Farringdon Road I got shown to my desk, which by the way looked the most hardcore programmers desk ever (4 screens + private army of mini ninjas), in the Creative Research & Development department. Then I got to meet some of the people in the CRD team and have a chat to get to know the various roles/titles people occupied. This didn’t make much sense at first as everyone seemed to have ‘Creative Developer’, ‘Director’ or ‘Interactive’ in their title so it took me a while to really understand what people did, and only then did I start questioning why some people had ‘Senior’ in their titles .

Next up on the list was learning Android which was great because this was something I had absolutely no knowledge about. This is something that has rightly been given a lot of attention and I found it a great thing to get experience in, much nicer doing Java than faffing around with Objective-C .

From then onwards things only got better. Nerves went away after a few days and I got to know the team well. My technical knowledge increased immensely, understanding of how projects are managed and structured grew but most importantly, I knew more and more that this is what I wanted to do as a career.

My first piece of work was a Flash piece (thanks Rick!) and it was good to have a break from PHP which had been my focus for the last few months for my new site (site working on it by the way!). This, although only a small project, gave me a good understanding of using OOP in real life applications, working with Creative to deliver it just as it should be, using SVN and gaining a better programming knowledge. Luckily I had a bit of time and someone helping me so I could understand everything that went on and why.

Once that was done it was back to general research and working on my new site with lots of comments coming from my right. The next thing to come would be attending my first client workshop which was pretty damn cool. This showed me a different aspect of the company and how AKQA works it’s magic with its clients. After taking part in this I realised that not only did I enjoy developing software, but I also enjoyed speaking to clients and learning about the preparation that went into these workshops. This made me realise that this is something that I would like to do, instead of just been a developer, but also lead projects and speak/present to clients.

I then worked on a project with Emile. This was the first time I had worked
on a professional application using PureMVC. The good thing with this
project was that I  could see what benefit using PureMVC had and what role
each part of the MVC pattern played. I also got to understand how continuous
integration works, what tools like Hudson do, what goes into deploying a
site to live, and finally I at last got to find out what a Technical
Delivery Manager does

Other things that I was lucky enough to be able to go to where the LFPUG event at AKQA and internal presentations on various topics that related to the role of a CRD developer. All interesting stuff and I was lucky to work in a company that have such talented people who are willing to put together all these sessions.

In between all of this I got to know the people in the CRD team a lot better and thanks to Aaron, Abe and everyone else who I met, I learnt a whole load of new stuff in regards to programming, projects, and life at AKQA. This was the best bit of my five weeks, getting to know the team. There was none of this ‘your just and intern clean my desk’ bullshit (except on one occasion, and I’m not doing that again without getting my Hantavirus jabs first :p), I just felt like one of the team and got on with everyone, which was the most important thing for me.

The five weeks I spent at AKQA were simply, brilliant. I had very little in the way of expectations, but I couldn’t of possibly wished for it to have gone any better. Thank you to everyone up there who I met for being unbelievably friendly, helpful and for teaching me an awful lot. Thank you especially to Aaron Newton for being my ‘mentor’ who, despite moaning like an old women 99.01% of the time, taught me a new way of thinking about my projects and helped me out on my work. Cheers

My biggest thank you goes to Andy Hood who made this whole thing possible, for giving me the chance to see what the New Media industry is aboust, meet the people who create the brilliant work that comes out of AKQA, learn a whole load of new stuff, experience all different aspects of the agency, and overall thank you for making me 110% sure that this is what I want to do as a career and also 110% sure that I want to return to AKQA.

I believe I have a dragon that needs returning.

Thank you all so much.

Good reads:
Rick Williams – Blog | Twitter
Dennis Ippel (crazy 3d guy) – Blog | Twitter
Aaron Newton (never let this guy have a plastic dragon) – Site | Twitter
Abe Azam – Blog
Joakim Carlgren (watch out) – Site
Richard Szalay – Blog | Twitter
Tudor Bay – Blog | Twitter
Wanja Stier – Blog | Twitter

SHAKES & FIDGETS – http://s1.sfgame.us/

The idea is that code is split into different bubbles, each one representing a function. You can then drop and drag different methods around, adding notes to them, marking them as bugs or flagging that particular function as important. I think this is a great way of coding as coding by nature is a very logical task and so by displaying it in a very organized, logical way makes a lot of sense. Traditionally code is just displayed as a single file with methods listed one after the other which is fine for smaller files/projects with a moderate amount of functions and classes with little to no external dependencies, but when you are dealing with large projects, multiple files and lots of external library’s then this way of logically splitting it up into relevant bubbles really makes sense. So watch the video and see what you think!

Project page here: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

Go on over and download it free of charge here. ]]> http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/11/04/unity3d-indy-untiy-free-for-all/feed/ 0 http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/11/03/hype-framework-bring-experimentation-to-the-masses/ http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/2009/11/03/hype-framework-bring-experimentation-to-the-masses/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:53:34 +0000 Harry http://www.harrynorthover.com/blog/?p=830 Continue reading →]]> Recently Joshua Davis and Brendan Hall released a new framework call HYPE. The aim of the framework is to allow everyone from newbie level to professionals experiment with ease using Flash.

I’m hoping to find some time in between GCSEs to have a go at making some stuff with this, so keep any eye out. You can download it here, and find the setup instructions here.

Have fun!!

Before you ask, no I wasn’t at MAX, but after making an attempt at going through some of the 250+ hours of footage I have found a few jems that I think are worth mentioning. It sounded quite an event and plenty of exciting announcements were made! Heres a few key sessions.

By now I am assuming you have all heard about native compiling to the iPhone in Flash CS5 and if you haven’t then be very ashamed :p . Well here’s a session that sheds some light on it if you haven’t got a clear understand:

Building Applications for iPhone using Adobe Flash CS5 professional

Now the next one is on the Flash Player its self, and what makes it tick. With each update the Flash Player gets more and more advanced, and with it complicated. Questions you never even had are answered in this session and it is a must see from my point of view.

Flash Player Internals

A lot of these things in this video I have never really thought about, but when they are explained you see what a difference they make and how important it is to know some of the stuff explained. One of the interesting concepts was at the start about rendering, describing the difference between Immediate and Retained rendering. Now I know this is simple stuff for the ‘pros’ amongst us, but for me I had never really understood this so it was nice to have it explained in simple terms.

For me one of the biggest announcements was that there is a new FLA format, which is going to be based on XML! This is a lot better than the current version which was essentially a ‘black box’ as XML is an extremely open and widely used language. The new format is essentially going to be a modified ZIP file contain separate files for the library assets, publication settings and document information which will make it easier to use in source control systems and other similar management tools.

XML based FLA: The New Flash File Format

Also, sorry it has been quite recently! I have been rather busy with school seeing as I am coming up to my GCSEs quite soon. I am also starting to think about work experience for the 2010 summer (July-August), and if anyone has any suggestions or offers then that would be brilliant!

Harry.

On the 22nd of July I attended the UK launch of Silverlight and Expression Studio 3 over at Microsoft London. As you may have realized Silverlight isn’t really my main area of expertise, and I’m not planning to change that, just in case you were worried .

The start time was at 1:30pm and the afternoon was split into two sessions but were really just a mix up of case studies and demos for agencies currently using Silverlight in their projects. The first session was about SketchFlow and Blend, and the second was on Expression Web and also on Silverlight it’s self. There was a lot of interesting stuff in the presentations but also some things that I wasn’t quite happy about.

Better Composition and Planning.

Expression SketchFlow is a piece of software which enabled the designers to import sketches, or create wireframes using components provided to create a version of a site for the client that exactly mimics the functionality of how the final product will look. To help with this process, ‘Sketch’ components are provided that function exactly like you would expect components too, for example a scroll bar, but they appear as if they were sketched. This is useful because;

1. It saves time having to create any graphics.
2. It prevents clients from focusing on the graphical side of things and just understanding how the function will work, not the form.

Once you have created you ‘sketch’ layout and used the components you need to, you can then to mimic even more functionality, can use SketchFlow’s built in states which are used for things like tabs, where you have an over, up, down, etc state. With SketchFlow you can plan for all of these and create basic animation which is not dissimilar to timeline animation in Flash. Also new to Silverlight 3 is built in easing effects to achieve are more professional animation.

The next part of the composition stage of the workflow is presenting the comp to the client. There are many ways in which Blend can do this like exporting to a Word document, but there is an even better way. It can generate an online application which is on your web server and loads in the current composition, and then the client can browse through all the revisions and leave feedback. All animation can be viewed and components can be interacted with, which means that the client can gain the full idea of what the user interaction is going to be like. This method is far superior to most used before like building a HTML version. This was hard to maintain and used up a lot of valuable time.

A streaming experience like never before. Pfft.

With Silverlight’s new media capabilities like real HD and adjustive streaming it’s not hard to see why NBC broadcasted Wimbledon and the Olympics in it.

According to the presenter, loading times are a thing of the past. Silverlight’s streaming capabilities have been designed so that they adapt to the current bandwidth. So if they are being used on a 3mb broadband connection they it will provide if possible full HD video so long as it can load it all without any delays, but if the connection is slow, the plugin realizes this and the decreases the quality of the video being played so that it can still load it all without delays. This is great as the majority of views move off a site after a while if they are sat waiting for something to load. A good example of this is the popular video sharing site YouTube which has an average watching time of 5 seconds! This is because users leave the site if they have to sit there and wait for it to load. When generating revenue from video it is crucial that you don’t loose visitors and Silverlight seems to cure one of the biggest headaches that a video sharing site faces.

Now one of the other problems with YouTube and the main reason behind its 5 second visiting time is that the player loads all off the video right to the end instead of just the first bit which is the bit people are mostly likely only going to watch. Silverlight uses a different method by dividing the video file into separate chunks and then loads them in order. This helps saves a lot of bandwidth as if people only stay the watch the first few seconds then the bandwidth won’t be wasted trying to load the whole video, but just the first bit which the user actually watched.

10 second install.

Those of you who have installed Silverlight know that it is an extremely easy install process, which Microsoft claims only takes 10 seconds. I have found this to be roughly true and I another major bonus is that I don’t even exit my browser! Compared to Flash’s installation which requires you to actually visit the Adobe site, and then quit your browser this is an oasis. It makes accessing Silverlight content even easier.

Let’s not forget good old HTML.

A lot has changed in Expression Web since I last looked at it, which I have to say was quite some time ago. One of the major new features and quite a useful one at that is SuperPreview. This is similar to Adobe BrowserLab which has recently been launched (coincidence?). In a nutshell SuperPreview allows you to view your web page using different browser rendering engines and compare them side by side. It can also tell you the position of every element in the HTML page and then show you how much it differs in one browser to another. This helps you to correct it to pixel perfection.

Also Expression Web comes with the ability to easily create and insert Silverlight DeepZoom and also Flash and other general Silverlight content with ease. Another helpful tool that works in conjunction with the other parts of the studio is Expression Encoder which allows you to take the pain out of converting and resizing video. Web utilizes this well as you can insert, convert and resize video ready for a HTML page right from within the tool with only a few clicks. This is something that is long overdue for Dreamweaver.

A very good question, 3D?

Now when we were in the Q&A session there was a very good question about what Microsoft has planned for gaming in Silverlight and how it compared to Unity3D. The speaker said he wasn’t familiar with Unity3D but that the 3D features would be improved. The next thing that was of interest was that they said that it might eventually possible to develop a game using the XNA framework and the have it run using the Silverlight plugin. Obviously the main problem with improving the graphics on a cross platform browser plugin is that you have to deal with so many different libraries and runtimes, and trying to get all these to the same level of performance and ease of use must be quite a challenge.

If Microsoft pull this off right then they could quite possibly be Unity3D’s biggest competitor and I cant see that they can stand up against something that is already on 1 in 3 internet enabled devices in the world. It’s a shame though that the presenter didn’t seem to give the impression that Microsoft were giving gaming much of a thought for the future versions of Silverlight.

What’s the catch?

So far, I have portrayed Silverlight 3 in a very good light, and with good reason. It has come on along way since I last looked at it, and if it carry’s on it’s rapid production cycle then Adobe better watch out. As the saying goes though, nothing is perfect and Silverlight is no exception. I couldn’t help but feel that all the new features and the tools themselves were aimed at big agency’s and companies with employees in their hundreds. The reason I think this is that for the average freelancer who can sit down and explain to their client what is going on, the new SketchFlow features wouldn’t really help that much. For example, the online tool to show clients what different comps the designer had come up with and the option to leave feedback would be pretty redundant for someone who can be right next to the client and explain. Although spoken explanation can only go so far and there is nothing like having a working demo with full interactivity, with SketchFlow can achieve with ease.

The next major problem that you will have all worked out by now is that the tools are still only for Windows! This is the biggest disadvantage for me as I have a MacBook and a Dell XPS. Although I can run it on my XPS, it would be nice not have to get Bootcamp up and running every time I want to work in Expression Studio. I can imagine that for studios that are 100% Mac, Silverlight will be a straight no. I expect that in time *hopefully* the tools will be released for Mac.

This last one is obvious and one that is to be expected but never the less a very important factor and on that puts of a lot of studios adopting Silverlight for projects other and research and development. It’s the adoption rate. As I mentioned earlier Silverlight is on 1 in 3 internet enabled devices but Flash player 9 is installed on 99% of all computers in the US/Canada and this is pretty much the same over all the world.

Conclusion.

Overall Silverlight has some good prospects if Microsoft carry on the rapid releases they have been while including major features in each release at the same time. Although I still feel that the penetration figures are not good enough for use right now, the easy install makes it easy to access Silverlight content so hopefully this should change. I look forward to playing around with the new Expression studio and I can’t wait to see what appears in Silverlight 4, and hopefully I’ll get invited to that launch as well!

Feel free to leave thoughts in the comments section below, and happy Silverlighting!

Harry.

Over the past few months I have acumilated quite a few interesting links in my ‘Favorite’ section on Twitter. So I thought instead of being an anti-social nerd, I could share them out to my readers. So here we go!

1. Open-source ActionScript libraries for creating Flash games : http://bit.ly/3BqFjr (via @mesh)
2. A showcase of some of the best PV3D projects out there : http://www.papervisionshowcase.com/ (via @c4rlo5)
3. Very interesting blog about games & flash to add to your reader: http://www.stephencalenderblog.com/ (via @mesh and @bartekd)
4. Amazing stop-motion video! How do they do this? http://bit.ly/wwALI (via @michaeledge)
5. ARhrrrr – An augmented reality shooter prototype http://post.ly/seY (via @rickwilliams)
6. 43 iPhone Development Resources http://bit.ly/jn3ra (via @creattica)
7. Stefano Dembro’s Robots http://www.stefanodembro.com/index.php?l=item&q=Papalote (via @joshspear)
8. Version 1.0 of today’s most popular applications, a visual tour http://bit.ly/b4Mkx (via @PSDTUTS)
9. Nice video of Flash builder 4 Developer Productivity new Features shown by David Zuckerman http://bit.ly/2XIafH (via @swfgeek)
10. Plug-in Media’s Big & Small Papervision site blends 3D with 2D very smoothly. A cut above, very nice job indeed. http://bit.ly/EXWge (via @richardleggett)

So there you go, my top 10 links for a while! I hope they are useful to you.

Harry.

You may have noticed that I have just updated my homepage with a little sign up feature that lets you enter your e-mail address and I’ll let you know when my portfolio is ready. *Don’t worry, these address will be destroyed after the notification has been sent and will not be sold or abused in anyway!* .

You can view the new page here: http://www.harrynorthover.com/, so head over there and stick your e-mail address in and i’ll let you know when my sites *finally* ready!

Harry.

This video was made by Tim Smit, who is a dutch student. For the video above, he did most of the work by himself. This mean filming the footage in his local village, adding in the special effects using After Effects and 3Ds Max and all with a budget of $150! The video is a test movie of his film ‘What’s In The Box’ and the official site can be found here.

I’ve heard that several Hollywood studios have been in contact with him and some are even discussing making his movie!