Today’s article presents a collection of procedurally-generated 3D shapes for Stage3D. In addition to spheres and cylinders, I’ve added circles, pyramids, cubes, and quads to the mix and refactored them all to inherit from a new Shape3D class. Read on for the full source code for all of these as well as a demo app.
Posts Tagged shape
A couple of weeks ago I presented a procedurally-generated sphere for Stage3D. Today I have one more procedurally-generated model for you: a cylinder. Cylinders are useful for a variety of purposes, especially during debugging. For example, you can use them to show the direction a player’s gun is pointing or to construct a simple X, Y, Z axis display. Read on for the source code and a demo app!
I was reminded about the flash.sampler API by Grant Skinner’s recent post about it. While only available in the debug player, it can still tell us some valuable information about what goes on in the release player. Today I’m using the getSize function to find out how much memory overhead various classes impose, even when they are empty.
Flash 9 and AS3 provide a lot of nice structure that Flash 8 and AS2 lacked. Instead of just MovieClip and TextField, we have a whole hierarchy of DisplayObject derivatives, including MovieClip and TextField. Most AS3 programmers know that Sprite is a more efficient class than MovieClip and have grown to use them when animation is not required. However, I find that very few AS3 programmers ever use some of the other, more obscure DisplayObject derivatives. Today I’ll talk a little about one of them: Shape.