I wrote these programs after I took a Game Data Structures and Algorithms class where I learned some of the math necessary to do 3D graphics. I became interested in doing 3D programming for Flash because there is no built-in support for 3D graphics. It was a good environment for starting from scratch to show that I could really understand the whole process. My code interfaces with Flash’s 2D drawing API to actually render the 3D objects to the screen.
The first program that I made allows the user to create and edit surfaces and vertices for 3D shapes, and to select more shapes from a list of presets. The shapes can also be exported to XML, so they can be saved.
After I wrote this first program, I decided that I wanted ‘real’ models that were more complex than anything I was going to produce with my own cumbersome model maker. I wrote a program that parsed FBX files, which is a file format usable by Maya, 3DS Max, etc. I then modified my previous program to make it into a Flash model viewer that could read this format. This new version also incorporates some new optimizations and texturing.
