Customer Reviews

Interactive Web Graphics With Shout3D

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The Shout3D package makes possible stunning interactive 3D content in web pages without the need to download and install plug-ins. You can now embed into Web pages scenes with Quake-line first person presence and speed: walking through scenes, looking at objects, even touching and moving them. It takes a while to realize that the demonstrations available at the web page (www.shout3d.com) are not streaming movies but are being generated on the fly, in real-time, by your own local browser. This is exciting and heady stuff.

It works, and it works now. And this book leads you through the steps, with carefully explained examples of each step.

But what a lot of steps there are: build a 3D model, export it to VRML, edit and publish it in a Shout format, extend a Java panel class and register abstract interface callbacks, extend a Java applet class and instantiate the panel, load the files onto an httpd server, and write HTML and JavaScript to present them.

It you want to put interactive 3D content onto a web site, and found yourself saying, "yeah, I've seen that" at each of the steps in the previous paragraph, then get this book now.

But the author, correctly seeing that this technology lies at the intersection of art and programming, seems to believe that a 3D artist with no programming experience can pick up all he needs as he goes through this book. And that is just hoping for too much. It is like showing a programmer with no art experience a pencil and paper, asking him to trace a picture of a fawn as an example, and then saying "just keep sketching and sketching, and soon you will be an artist". While not actually incorrect, it isn't really helpful. So the book is burdened with descriptions of changing directories using the CD command keystroke by keystroke, and at the same time dispatches learning the Java AWT with a single sentence.

While the book is overambitious in some ways, it is a bit insular in others. The author is very upfront about his relationship with the Shout3D company, so it is not suprising that competing technologies (such as Blaxxun and Anfy) are not mentioned, and we can forgive the author the clumsy hype that is sprinkled through the book (though I don't think he really meant that the achievement of Shout3D "cannot be underestimated").

However, while one of the claimed virtues of Shout3D is that it is inexpensive (it is), the only 3D modeller program mentioned (3D Studio Max) is pricey (about 5 to 10 thousand dollars a seat). There are a lot of inexpensive and freeware modellers on the Web, and the book would have been improved by providing a guide or pointer to these alternatives (I like Spazz3D).

I also feel that the book is a bit muddled in its descriptions of the D's in 3D: dimensions, coordinates, and coordinate transformations. In two adjacent paragraphs, the author calls axis-angle descriptions of rotations in 3D incomprehensible and impossible to graph, and then calls them inherently superior. And in other examples, the distinction between the xyz coordinates in model space and the xy pixel coordinates on the screen are not kept clear. The powerful tools that the package provides (such as the Picker) to make these difficult tasks easy probably should have been a focus of the book. As it is, they are mentioned in passing.

Overall, if you have some programming experience and want 3D in web pages now, this is the book.