Amazingly, everything you see in a Stage3D scene is one of two very basic elements: the solid background color and a triangle. Yes, realistic portrayals of human avatars, fantastical renderings of futuristic spaceships, and every special effect you’ve ever seen are nothing more than cleverly-processed triangles. Just how are they so cleverly processed to get these effects? Today’s article takes you through the journey these triangles take from lowly three-sided shapes to building blocks of immersive experiences.
Archive for May, 2012
Now that we know how to use textures with an alpha channel in rendering Stage3D scenes, let’s see if we can cut the performance cost so we can use them more often. Today’s article will show some tricks to optimize your rendering loop.
Stage3D makes a lot of common tasks more complicated. One such task is using a texture/image that has alpha on it. With classic 2D Flash, this is done automatically for us. With Stage3D, we must resort to some obscure tricks. Today I’ll show you those tricks so you can use alpha textures in your Stage3D-accelerated Flash app.
AS3 gives you arrays and a way to sort them, but no easy way to keep them sorted as you add elements to them. Today’s article discusses an easy way to do just that: build a sorted array and keep it sorted. As a bonus, the array provides very fast searching for the elements it contains.