Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

As you might expect in a technical book like this, things start off simple and gradually become more complex. With this chapter, you reach a pinnacle of complexity. Not that the rest of the chapters after this are all downhill, but I think this one in particular requires that you have not skimped on the material that came earlier. That said, I’ll walk you through the concepts step by step, and if you’ve followed along reasonably well up to now, you should be fine.

I’m pretty happy with how the progression of these chapters has turned out. Each chapter adds a new concept that generally seems to progress in terms of interaction. At first, you just had things moving around. Then things started interacting with the environment, then the user, and then each other through collisions. In this chapter, I’ll expand on the ways objects interact with each other, particularly from a distance. Specifically, I’ll cover particles, gravity (a little differently this time), springs (again!), and the world-famous Node Garden. Let’s dive right in!

Up to now, you’ve been going down a particular path, and it has all flowed very nicely. In fact, the previous chapters covered just about all the basics of interactive ActionScripted animation, even all the very advanced “basics.” Now, I’m going to branch off to some other interesting techniques that use kinematics.

In Chapter 13, I covered some of the basics of kinematics and the difference between inverse and forward kinematics. That chapter went into forward kinematics. Now, you’re ready for its close relative, inverse kinematics. The movements involved are dragging and reaching.

Everything you’ve done so far in the book has been in just two (and sometimes only one) dimension, and you’ve done some pretty cool stuff. Now, let’s take it to the next level.

Chapter 15 presented an introduction to 3D, but took you only as far as positioning objects in a 3D space and figuring out their size and screen position. The objects themselves were actually 2D. It is kind of like those older 3D games where you could walk around an object or a character and it would seem to turn to face you. That object or character was not actually turning—but it appeared that way because it was a 2D object and that’s the only view of it you had.

In Chapter 16, I covered all the basics of modeling 3D solids: how to create the points, lines, and polygons that make up a form, even how to give each polygon a color. But if you recall, you just left that color with a 50% transparency, so you could see right through it. So while it was cool to be able to model complex 3D solids, you’re still lacking a lot in terms of realism.

In this chapter, I’m not necessarily going to introduce any new types of motion or physics or methods of rendering graphics. What I am going to do is give you an introduction to , which provide an alternative way of doing a lot of the things you’ve already been doing.

Well, you made it to the last chapter. This one I set aside for all the little things I really wanted to tell you about, but didn’t really fit in anywhere else, or would have distracted from the main points I was trying to get across in some other chapter.