Recently, Tim and myself where lucky enough (literary, we drew straws with the rest of the flash team) to attend a Papervision3D workshop in Vegas hosted by John Grden, one of the developers of Papervision3D. Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform, and in my opinion one of the most exciting things happening in the flash world today.
While John was not the man behind most of the code (Carlos Ulloa is the lead developer), he was a super friendly guy who was probably more appropriate for giving presentations. You could just feel his child-like excitement as he revealed his Papervision3D creations, the first one being an Xwing fighter game, of course! While Tim and I commented later that we wished he would have been more thorough about the details of the code, John doesn’t consider himself to be a hardcore programmer – but that didn’t suppress his passion for Papervision3D, and in some ways made his explanations more approachable for non-programmers, or those just new to 3D.
At the end of the 2 day workshop we both left very inspired. I believe that using Papervision3D tastefully in our future projects will really push our work to the next level. Flash has come a LONG way since the days of mainly vector sites and splash pages. With the combination of the AS3 code base, video, bitmap effects, filters, blending modes, and now 3D we can pretty much do anything we want!... within reason.
A couple of my favorite interface examples:
www.nike.com/nikeacg/index-en.html
www.whitevoid.com/application
http://www.nitrogroup.com/
- Neal
