man Clark I know exactly how you feel. My learning curve on the whole Molehill thing has been that I first took the deep dive into understanding shaders, got the books, worked the examples here http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2555 and here http://labs.jam3.ca/2011/03/molehill-getting-started/ then tried to understand AGAL and then realized wow that's some deep s***! My conclusion after spending all that time is that its only good to know that stuff in an academic sense, but frankly not very useful. I'm glad I got the foundation, but unless I wanted to reinvent one giant wheel and write my own framework it just made a lot more sense to put my time into using and learning an existing framework. I looked at all of them and concluded Away3D has the best future since the community is so active.
Also, to make the leap from Flash 2D to start learning 3D concepts and work-flow I started working with the new Blender release which has finally revamped their UI to something usable. If you go that route, there is a great new book I recommend by Lance Flavell called Beginning Blender. It is the only one I found that is up to date with the new UI- important because it is so different that older books are fairly useless. I'd also recommend checking out Unity3D. It's great for understanding how to organize assets in 3D. On May 17, 3:15 am, Clark Stevenson <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey guys. > > This question isnt about Away3d, but i know you guys are on the ball if your > building a complete 3d engine in Molehill. > > So there must be more like minded minds! > > Here is how i feel. One morning, all Flash Developers went to sleep, and > they woke up that morning, grabbed the incubator build and started writing > crazy GPU based shaders, 3d engines, and so on and so on. > > I woke up that morning, and i had missed the boat. > > I dont understand Molehill in any way, i never understood Pixel Bender 1 (i > tried for a long long time on this), now Pixel Bender 3D is here. It seems > like everyones at the party but me. > > Can i ask you guys to rewind a little, and tell me how you went from some > basic 2D transformations matrixs in Flash, to fully blown Vertex and > Fragment shader developers seemingly overnight??? This obviously doesnt > apply to the Away3D team, since for years you have completely overshadowed > my knowledge. But none the less, it seems that everyone has some idea on how > to use all of this new technology apart from me. > > Dont get me wrong, im still playing Broomstick, but i want to know more! > > Is there any specific area in Computing i should be looking at? I mean, do > i need to get a book dedicated to Shaders in DirectX (and start learning > there) or is that completely unrelated to Pixel Bender? Or should i be > studying image processing techniques or is that just one of the many things > that shaders do? Should i be studying color theory to tryu to get a grip > of color values (properly and in depth), or should i simply download > blender, or 3Ds max, and start my journey there understanding lighting, > materials...... Or maybe i should begin in the maths world with 3D Matrixs. > > Can anyone offer advice on some place i can begin to understand these new > technologies from any entry point? Anything unrelated but of some value is > great, i just dont know where to begin. > > Thanks for reading,
