Finaly, a conference for freelancers.GoingSOLO.

I remember the first time I heard about Stephanie Booth was from Aral Balkan while following him in Twitter. Soon after I heard about GoingSOLO, a conference dedicated to Freelancers. Today, the conference begins and after looking at videos of GoingSOLO, I am sure to miss out the good speakers and nice people around as I could not make it to the conference.
I appreciate Stephanie’s initiative and hope her all the best for the conference. I hope to get the updated videos of the conference online soon.

Adobe FlashPlayer 10(Astro),Beta Released.

A great news comes from Adobe as it released its next version of FlashPlayer, Flash Player 10, codenamed Astro. Though this is a beta release, but one can obviously get an idea about what is coming next. The big news for me in this release is 3D support and realtime audio support. Well, a whole new bitmap effects scripting language Pixel Bender(previously known as Hydra).
Kaourantin specifies in his blog regarding the old SOUND_COMPLETE issue and the details about the new sound API in Astro. Expectations are sound is going to be the next big thing in Flash after 3D. There will be definitely high level APIs come up for sound as it came up for 3D in flash (example : Papervision 3D).
Cheers to Adobe for Astro.

Away3D : first impression

Once I had some fun with Sandy3D, my curiosity drove me to Away3D. So I went ahead and tried Away3D. As derived from Papervision3D, developing in Away3D feels the same as developing in Papervision3D, with some predefined classes to make less codes and lesser processes to reach the same objective.

I have zipped up my experiment files here for you to download. But I found the study of papervision3D examples provides a lot of help to develop in Away3D too. One has a lot of options while creating 3D Objects and materials. Unlike Sandy3D, here we have the camera Object inside the Scene Object.One can directly get a reference of the camera from the scene object itself. More or else I found this is the same what Sandy3D does but in the reverse.I mean, in Sandy3D we create camera and then put that in one group of objects. Here we create View object(scene object is referenced from inside this view object only) and then get the reference of the camera from that view object itself.Of course we need to add the different 3D objects we create to the scene object itself through the view object.
Material options are also quite impressive. To outline the rendered objects ‘WireframeMaterial’ can be added to an object. The ‘WireColorMaterial’ actually renders the objects in color with the wireframe. Its like ‘Shading with edges’ option in 3DSMax viewport display. Here is my output of this experiment.
Moreover I found this is awesome to develop in Away3D, as this has the Papervision3D options in hand with lesser lines of code. If one wants to stick to the basics it should be Papervision3D, but if you want speed Away3D is the way to go.

Sandy3D, first impression

I was trying my hands on Sandy3D yesterday, I was overwhelmed with the features and the ease of use of this package. I tried it with FlashDevelop IDE and free Flex3 SDK and the development environment is simple, sweet and straight forward, loved in the first place itself. Then I went ahead and tried in FlashIDE and found its the same simple process.So whatever environment you choose, its going to be simple and easy. Here is the output of my experiment.
The process of creating 3D in Sandy3D package(and basically all kinds of 3D packages) is as follows:
1. Create the primitive objects
2. Create the materials
3. Add the materials to the appropriate objects
4. Create a Group of all the objects
5. Create Camera
6. Create the Scene Object
7. Render the Scene

Creating 3D objects has got various options like Line3D,Plane3D,Box etc. Well, while creating the objects there is a option to make the drawing unit as a triangle or quad.By default it makes in triangles and can be changed to quad.This is especially draw my attention as in the beginning 3DSMax never provided real QUAD based geometry edit option, but slowly it had been added. So ‘quad’ as a building unit is really a good news for me as a 3DArtist.Now, there is another great option is there for the 3D objects is ‘backfaceculling’.This option shows/hides the opposite side of a face. That means, by default Sandy3D does not render the backface of a geometry shape, this is ideal for speed and resource.But sometimes we need to have both the sides of a geometry to be rendered, then we need to make use of ‘backfaceculling’.It goes like
this.myBox.enableBackFaceCulling = false;//by default its ‘true’, to avoid rendering backface
Creating materials has got option to create transparency, use light etc.One good option I found is, if one wants to make the rendering of objects, kind of cell rendering, one can do that by providing line information in the material itself.Cool. All the lighting and material information is stored as ‘Appearance’ object.
Next is to assign the material to the object.This is done by assigning the ‘appearance’ property of the 3D objects to the ‘appearance’ created, while creating the material.Once done with it, one has to make a group of all the objects going to be rendered.There is a ‘Group’ class to be used to make this and the ‘addChild()’ method of group object adds objects to the group.
Creating a Camera object is done by ‘Camera3D’ class. This has got options to set FOV(Field Of Vision), Far Clip Plane and Near Clip Plane along with the position and transformation property.This is cool.
Creating a Scene is done with ‘Scene3D’ object.It takes the name of the scene, container of the 3D objects, camera object and the root group of all the objects for current scene.
The very last step is to render the Scene by calling ‘render()’ method of the scene object.
I am providing the source files along with the FlashDevelop project, so that you can directly open inside FlashDevelop.
All in all, I found Sandy3D is quite promising and can be used in a production environment.

The Phoenix Experience (from Aviary)

Today I got the invitation for Aviary.I was so excited that I tried it out right when I got the invitation.Well, I was further excited to see the way the tool has been made. Its all flash and looks like working in native desktop application(Photoshop itself).I have attached some screen shots to make you believe that now there is really no difference between a desktop application and a web application.Thanks and congrats to the Aviary team to come up with such a brilliant idea. I wish all the best and keep your good wok going, for the team.

Lets talk about Phoenix, now. Its an image editor and reflects the tools a great image editor should be having.To start with I had uploaded one jpg image and launch the Editor. Phoenix launched itself and I am surprised with the tool sets it provide to me.I felt like I am opening Photoshop itself.Phoenix has got layers, history, selection tools like lasso, magic wand, fill tools like paint bucket and gradient fill(can customise gradient as in a good photo editor).Well, the usual short-cuts like ctrl+s(save), ctrl+z(undo) are also working inside the application. Further more one can export the images in various formats starting from jpg, png,gif to psd.This is tremendous work.From the first instance itself I fall in love with it.
Well, along with my invitation acceptance, I have got 5 invitations to share. Anybody interested in it can write down a comment here along with your email id and preferred username, so that I can send you one invitation.Since I have only 5 invitations, I would be sending them as first come first serve basis.