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Congratulations! You’ve made it through what will probably be the heaviest math in the book. You now have in your repertoire the methods for handling accurate collision reactions. This is one of the most common things that people write to me asking about. With what you have under your belt right now, you could whip up a pretty decent game of billiards, which would be a fitting thing to do with billiard ball physics! One thing I’ve totally ignored in these examples, just to keep them simple, is the concept of friction. You might want to try adding that into the system. You certainly know enough at this point to do so. You might also want to check out Chapter 19, where I give you a little trick to use in the case that both objects have the same mass.

In the next chapter, I’ll tone things down a bit and look into particle attraction, though adding in some billiard ball physics to the examples there would be quite fitting.

This chapter covered interaction between particles at a distance, and how you can use gravity and springing for interesting effects. As a result, you have two new ways to make some very dynamic motion graphics involving many objects.

In the next couple of chapters, I’m going to talk about some very new subjects: . These techniques allow you to make cool things like robot arms and walking figures.

You’ve done some pretty powerful stuff in this chapter, conquering the basics of forward kinematics. Note that the methods I gave you here are probably not the only solutions to the subject. They’re obviously tailored toward a particular application of the technology: making something walk. Feel free to leave things out, change things, or add whatever you want to this system. Experiment and see what you can come up with.

As a bonus, I’ve provided another file, ch13_10.fla, in which you’ll see a much fuller application of forward kinematics, building on what you’ve done here. Check out that code for a few extra tips and tricks.

Next up, you’ll look at the other side of the coin: inverse kinematics.

Inverse kinematics is a vast subject—far more than could ever be covered in a single chapter. Even so, I think this chapter described some pretty cool and useful things. You saw how to set up an inverse kinematics system and two ways of looking at it: dragging and reaching. If nothing else, I hope I’ve at least sparked some excitement in you for the subject. The main ideas I’ve tried to convey are that you can do some really fun stuff with it, and it doesn’t have to be all that complex. There’s much more that can be done in Flash with inverse kinematics, and I’m sure that you’re now ready to go discover it and put it to use.

In the next chapter, you’re going to enter a whole new dimension, which will allow you to add some depth to your movies. Yes, we’re going 3D.

You now have the basics of 3D under your belt, and you’ve seen most of the basic motion code adapted for 3D. I have to say I kind of surprised myself by the number of times I was able to say, “This is the same as 2D, you just have to add a z variable ...,” or something of the sort. I thought there would be more complex stuff to explain here, but most of it turned out to be rather simple.

You’ll use a lot of what you learned here in the next chapter, where you actually begin to sculpt 3D forms with points and lines.

With what you’ve learned in this chapter, you should be well on your way to modeling your own 3D shapes in ActionScript and manipulating them in 3D space.

This chapter concentrated on the modeling aspect and on how to draw the lines and fills. In the next chapter, you’ll explore how to create more solid-looking solids. All that material builds on the foundation of points, lines, and fills that you’ve covered here. So, when you’re ready, let’s move on!

Wow! That was a lot of work for just three examples! But I think the results are well worth it. You now have the tools to make some pretty stunning 3D movies. And it goes without saying that there are a lot of variations you can throw in here. For instance, in the last example, the light is stationary and the object moves. Try moving the light around instead. (It’s just a matter of altering its x, y, and/or z positions.) In fact, as a bonus, you can check out ch17_04.fla, where I have the light controlled by the mouse. You might want to try to get the light orbiting around a stationary object.

That about wraps up our main discussion of 3D. In the next chapter, you’ll be looking at matrix math, which is often used as an alternative to some of the scaling and rotation methods you’ve been using so far, and thus is something you’ll often see in 3D programming.

I’ve covered the basics of what matrices are, how to use them and combine them, and created some pretty cool effects with them in this chapter. Now that you have the concepts in your head, you’re ready to take advantage of the power that matrices can offer, and hopefully won’t shy away from using them when you encounter them in the built-in methods of Flash 8, as you surely will.

Most organizations have a map of their applications environment and infrastructure systems. How up to date and accurate is your map? Is it also used for purposes of planning, i.e. does it include representations of multiple past and future states? Are you able to run gap Analyses of current and target states? Do you have a practice of aligning your project portfolio with the measures derived from the planning of the applications environment and the gap analysis? Does this or some other procedure allow you to ensure that the various measures of technical renovation (e.g. enterprise application integration) harmonize with the IT investment strategies of the departments in your organization and that are outlined in the project portfolio?