Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! (Paperback)

by Keith Peters (Author)
Key Phrases: private function init, following document class, basic motion code, Siúf Iip, Flex Builder, Pythagorean Theorem (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
In this book, you'll learn

• All the ActionScript 3.0 (including math and trigonometry functions) and Flash rendering techniques you'll need to start animating with code
• Basic motion principles such as velocity, acceleration, friction, easing, and bouncing
• How to handle user interaction via the keyboard and mouse
• Advanced motion techniques such as springs, coordinate rotation, conservation of momentum, and forward and inverse kinematics
• All the basic 3D concepts you need to do 3D in Flash, from simple perspective to full 3D solids complete with backface culling and dynamic lighting

Flash has long been one of the most approachable, user-friendly tools for creating web-based animations, games, and applications. This has contributed to making it one of the most widely used programs for creating interactive web content. With each new version of Flash, ActionScript, its built-in scripting language, has become more powerful and a little more complex, too. ActionScript, now at version 3.0, has significantly matured as a programming language, bringing power and speed only previously dreamed about to Flash-based animation, going far beyond traditionally used keyframes and tweens. The material inside this book covers everything you need to know to harness the power of ActionScript 3.0. First, all the basics of script-based animation and setting up an ActionScript 3.0 project are covered. An introduction to object-oriented programming follows, with the new syntax, events, and rendering techniques of ActionScript 3.0 explained, giving you the confidence to use the language, whether starting from scratch or moving up from ActionScript 2.0. The book goes on to provide information on all the relevant trigonometry you will need, before moving on to physics concepts such as acceleration, velocity, easing, springs, collision detection, conservation of momentum, 3D, and forward and inverse kinematics. In no time at all you'll both understand the concepts of scripted animation and have the ability to create all manner of exciting animations and games.

Summary of Contents

• PART ONE - ACTIONSCRIPTED ANIMATION BASICS
  • Chapter 1 Basic Animation Concepts
  • Chapter 2 Basics of ActionScript 3.0 for Animation
  • Chapter 3 Trigonometry for Animation
  • Chapter 4 Rendering Techniques
• PART TWO - BASIC MOTION
  • Chapter 5 Velocity and Acceleration
  • Chapter 6 Boundaries and Friction
  • Chapter 7 User Interaction: Moving Objects Around
• PART THREE - ADVANCED MOTION
  • Chapter 8 Easing and Springing
  • Chapter 9 Collision Detection
  • Chapter 10 Coordinate Rotation and Bouncing Off Angles
  • Chapter 11 Billiard Ball Physics
  • Chapter 12 Particle Attraction and Gravity
  • Chapter 13 Forward Kinematics: Making Things Walk
  • Chapter 14 Inverse Kinematics: Dragging and Reaching
• PART FOUR - 3D ANIMATION
  • Chapter 15 3D Basics
  • Chapter 16 3D Lines and Fills
  • Chapter 17 Backface Culling and 3D Lighting
• PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL TECHNIQUES
  • Chapter 18 Matrix Math
  • Chapter 19 Tips and Tricks

About the Author
Keith lives in the vicinity of Boston, MA, in the USA with his wife Kazumi and their new daughter Kristine. He has been working with Flash since 1999, and has co-authored many books for friends of ED, including Flash MX Studio, Flash MX Most Wanted, and the ground-breaking Flash Math Creativity.

In 2001 he started the experimental Flash site, BIT-101 (www.bit-101.com), which strives for a new, cutting edge, open source experiment each day. The site recently won an award at the Flashforward 2003 Flash Film Festival in the Experimental category. In addition to the experiments on the site, there are several highly regarded Flash tutorials which have been translated into many languages and are now posted on web sites throughout the world. Keith is currently working full time doing freelance and contract Flash development and various writing projects.

Product Details

• Paperback: 568 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED; illustrated edition edition (April 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597915
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597910
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,507 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes animation programming comprehensible for anyone., April 15, 2007

By	George D. Girton (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Boing Boing Boing!"

Keith Peters's engaging and readable book on Flash 9, Actionscript 3.0 Animation is quite unusual for a programming techniques book. It assumes you know very little, but it ends up being an authoritative work of lasting value.

Notwithstanding the "3.0" in the title, this is the second edition of "Making things Move," updated for Actionscript 3.0. The first version sold very well, but I think the second edition will open up Flash to a much wider audience.

This is because Peters almost always gives you two or three ways of doing something, and this extends to whatever Flash development environment you have chosen. There are three ways you can write Actionscript 3 for Flash: The Flash IDE (which you get when you buy Adobe Flash), Flex Builder 2 (which you get when you buy Adobe Flex Builder) and the free Flex 2 SDK (which you get when you download Flex SDK free from the Adobe website.) I use the third environment, so I really appreciate that "Making Things Move" tells you how to set up "trace" for debugging in the free Flex SDK environment. Because of the popularity of Flash animation, and the fact that the book tells you how to use the free development environment (and the fact that Actionscript 3 is so great), I think this book will be both popular and influential.

So, I found nuts and bolts information in the very beginning that was probably worth the price of the book even if I didn't animate a single bouncing ball, but what's the rest of the book about? Three things that everyone learned (or should have learned) in school: trigonometry, physics and how to think about stuff on your own. And you get it an applied context that basically gives you everything you need to build, and to understand how to build, an interactive 2D or 3D game -- except fancy graphics, of course.

User interaction, moving objects around, collision detection (two or three different methods), how to use acceleration and velocity for springing and easing, billiard ball physics, how to make things walk (forward kinematics) and reach for stuff (reverse kinematics), plus rotate collide and move in 3 dimensions, it's all in the book. All completely comprehensible. Various ways of placing things randomly on the screen, how to bounce back after colliding, how to swarm objects and connect them to each other? All covered. Matrix math, Brownian motion? Covered and explained. About the only thing Peters doesn't give you is the rotation matrices for four-dimensional graphics, but to be perfectly fair, nobody else does either.

This book is a product of tons of experience and thoughtfulness. Each technique appears to be so simple -- certainly there isn't too much code in any one example -- and yet along with each technique, it seems like there's at least one little `gotcha' that Keith Peters tells you how to avoid. In other words, you can scan the book quickly to see what's in it, to see what's there and examine the formulas, and then when you go back and read it, you also benefit because you pick up one of these 'gotchas' or an explanation of why one way is better than doing it another way.

Will you find this review useful if I don't complain about something? Okay! Well, in the spaceship example in chapter 5, which uses the keyboard, nothing works unless you click on the window first. The book says nothing about this, or how to prevent it. Can you set the keyboard focus onto your movie without clicking the mouse on it? I wish I knew.

Less important, in nearly every code example in the book, the constructor of each document class calls an init() method, which Peters says is a recommended "best practice" I would like to know why this is a best practice, since it just makes the code (and the book) longer and (ok, just slightly) more time consuming to read.

Lastly, everyone knows (or will know after reading this book) there are two kinds of animation, frame-based and timer-based. What I never realized is that there's a third form, time-based animation, that's smoother and more accurate than either frame based or timer based. Plus, it's immune to the frame rate of the movie, the motion stays just as smooth and constant as you have intended it to be. I really appreciate the fact that the book brought this to my attention, but why did the author wait until page 505 to get around to it? No matter, you're crazy if you don't read every page, from the beginning of the forward ("This is a book about art"), right to the very end of the index ("zero, dividing by zero in Flash").

This book is packed with useful information from beginning to end and will give you many happy hours and things to do on long winter nights in front of your compute; the very last example in the book, slipped in as a final parting gift just before the recap of all the book's equations, tells how to add the "Boing" sound to the bounce of your bouncing ball, in just 3 lines of code.

If you don't have any books on Actionscript 3, I think this is probably the best one to start with until the Moock book comes out, if you have an interest in animation.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great buy, not a great upgrade, June 24, 2007

By	Thomas B. Talbot (Gunpowder, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First off, the previous version was the best actionscript and or graphics book for the Flash environment I had ever read. Useful segments of script and the practical approach to getting common graphics, animation, collision, 3D and kinematics work done were invaluable.

My criticism of the current edition is that, with the exception of placing everything in a class structure for actionscript 3.0, the new edition lacks novel content. There are no new techniques, projects, nor animations. Also, the programs may be written in classes, but often the programs don't take advantage of the object oriented techniques encouraged in 3.0 actionscript.

The parts about using the Flex SDK are interesting as they allow people to program in actionscript without having to buy anything. It is pretty obvious that this book was written before the Flash CS3 version came out as it would be more aptly named "actionscript animation 3.0 for flex" as some of the techniques necessary to make graphical objects in the flex environment are inconvenient for those using Flash CS3.

So, my bottom line:
If you don't have this book and want to program graphics in flash/flex, get this book before all others.
If you already have the previous edition, don't bother upgrading. (though for me it didn't work out too bad because I used the previous edition so much I wore it out.)

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Problems with code not working, July 2, 2007

By	Joy D. Jacques (Cannon Falls, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was eagerly awaiting this book because of the good reviews, but I've had lots of problems getting his code to work.

He uses old AS2 keywords in examples as user created function names, but this causes errors. I had to look online to find out that solution. There was nothing on the "Friends of Ed" site.

Next, the drawing example he gives on page 64 did not produce the arrow it was supposed to produce. I am new to this level of coding, so some of my problems may be my lack of experience, but it's tough to learn if the code examples don't work.

I wish the Friend of Ed would post some corrections and/or help. I'm sure that the problems I've had with the book are because the author was using a development version of AS 3.0, but they should get information up about the issues.