Professional Papervision3D

Chapter 2. Getting Started With Papervision3D

Emanating from the AS3 are a host of 3D open source endeavors, such as Away3D, Sandy3D, Alternative3D, and Papervision3D. Of the numerous 3D platforms hitting the stage, Papervision3D is by far the most popular and enjoys an ever-growing user group and development team.

Originally conceived by Carlos Ulloa in November 2005 and converted to Great White by Ralph Hauwert, it has grown from approximately 20 classes to over 300. It's maintained by a 10+ core and committer team. And with the release of Papervision3D 2.0, developers worldwide began downloading and contributing to this phenomenal open source project.

In this chapter, you start by downloading the basic Papervision3D classes, and examining the basics of 3D used in this book, and the guts of Papervision3D. Then, you'll create a simple hello world application and build a simple Papervision3D class. Finally, you learn how to apply BasicView to simplify the creation of a Papervision3D application.

Getting Papervision3D

Start by downloading the Papervision3D classes. Getting Papervision3D isn't as simple as just downloading and unzipping it, you need a subversion client. Subversion is a great tool, which helps developers keep track of code changes. As so many developers are working on Papervision3D it's essential to keeping it up to date and maintained. Here are the steps you need to follow to get the Papervision3D classes:

1. Download and install a SVN client. Tortoise for Windows (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ ...