Everyday 3D

On June 9th the Polish Adobe User Group organized a Flash Camp in Warsaw. It was the first meeting of this kind in Poland. I had the privilege to be one of the speakers. It was a one day event featuring 6 sessions all related to Flash & Flex. It aroused great interest in the local Flash Community and more than 300 people attended

We kicked off in the morning with a very comprehensive presentation by Serge Jespers on the Flash Platform. Serge went through a lot of interesting projects including some of the best Augmented Reality examples. He also showcased his favorite AIR applications. Apparently AIR is not used only for Twitter clients! But seriously, I neglected this technology so far, but I promised myself to fix this in the near future. I’m looking for some ideas for a simple AIR app now… a Collada viewer maybe?

Next, the Platform Evangelist from Poland, Piotr Walczyszyn gave us an insightful presentation on Flash Catalyst and the new Flash Builder. I use FDT to do all my Flash stuff for some time now, so all the things he presented were totally new to me. I must say I was surprised how fast and efficient the new workflow is. Things like working directly with PSD files in Catalyst look great (how many hours have I spent “cutting” PSD files and importing them into Flash!) He build a complete application connected to a database without writing a single line of code! It was amazing… and a bit frightening too ;)

Wojtek Ptak made a great presentation about building large scale RIA’s. Usually this kind of applications are not my primary interest but Wojtek showed us some really inspiring stuff and it was a pleasure to listen to him speaking.

Unfortunately I could not attend the other sessions, because I was rehearsing my own. It was my first public presentation, so I was pretty excited but also a bit nervous, especially that I did not expect such a huge crowd.

During my session, I focused on 3D in Flash (of course!). By showing some new and old demos I tried to explain the fundamental concepts of 3D graphics and how they are implemented in Actionscript. After my session I had a few minutes to answer some questions. Most of them were about Papervision3D, and the nature of those questions clearly showed that they were coming from very experienced developers. I did my best to answer all of them.

Overall it was a great experience, and I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me. I like the idea of public speaking. It’s a great way to share some thoughts and knowledge, but also, most importantly, to meet interesting people. I feel it nicely complements my blogging experience, so from now on I’ll be looking for more speaking opportunities.

Today I switched my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I was a tough decision, but it was better to do it now, then later, when my blog will have more content. This operation might have caused, as a side effect, the resetting of all the posts in the RSS feed, which in turn did show them as “unread” in the readers. They are not new though, so just mark them as read… and sorry for the mess! :)

After almost 1,5 year in FI I decided to take another path, and from the end of March 2008 I will be starting as a Flash Developer in a web & film production company B-Reel.

Work in FI was my best profesional experience so far, and I would recommend anyone who wants to learn how to create and deliver the highest quality to apply there. It is also a place where one can meet the most skilled developers around, and last but not least, they have a beautiful office here in Stockholm.

B-Reel is a company that specializes in online campaings that combines video, animation and interactivity.

The end od 2007 was a busy time for me at FI. I was working on a project for Porsche, part of their global campaing promoting a new model of Cayenne – the GTS. Together with the team in Fi we developed a site that revolves around the experience of engine sound in different Porsche models. The result of this effort is a minisite “Cayenne GTS, the bloodlines are unmistakable“, that was launched end Jan 2008. When you check out the campaing site, be sure to turn your speakers on!

This projects marks an important milestone for me. First of all FI received a “FWA Site of the day” award for it. I think is was our 25th overall, but for me personally it’s the first for a project that I worked on, so I was really happy.

I also happened to be my first AS3 project ever, and I was excited to discover that we finally have a full featured OOP language at our disposal. It was a huge boost of energy, after all these years of AS2 when there was almost nothing new to learn.

Updates:

Feb 19th. Another distinciton, on WebDesignAwards this time. Sweet!

Feb 21st. I posted a short article on FI’s blog ThinkSwedish about the sounds in the Porsche site.

Search-this recently published an entry ‘3 Flash Masters Answer 5 Flash Questions‘. As I Interactive Developer in FI I was on of the three persons featured.

Following this short and rather general interview I posted some Flash tips & trick on our blog – ThinkSwedish, enjoy!