Building Vrml Worlds (Paperback)

~ Claire Sanders (Author), Charlie Scott (Author), Paul Wolfe (Author), Sebastian Hassinger (Author), (Author, Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Building VRML Worlds takes you through the process of designing and constructing VRML worlds for the Web. It addresses artistic and pragmatic concerns, helping you create easily navigable, intuitive, and attractive worlds without busting your user's bandwidth. It provides a well-rounded glimpse into today's VRML tools, including Paragraph's Virtual Home Space Builder, Caligari's Pioneer, and Virtus WalkThrough Pro, as well as Java tools such as DimensionX's Liquid Reality and Kinetix's Hyperwire, VR servers such as Tenet Network's VRServer, and 3D packages such as 3D Studio Max and Strata Studio Pro. A discussion of creating server-side and client-side apps helps non-programmers start thinking about writing CGI and Java scripts to enhance and run their animation. You also get a thorough glossary, and a hybrid CD includes demos of Pioneer, Studio Pro, VRServer, and other VRML-related apps.

Product Description

This book is a complete source for learning how to create the exciting realm of a virtual world. It is a hands-on, how-to guide using VRML technology which combines lucid discussions of object definition and creation techniques with tool tutorials and a thorough analysis of existing VRML resources.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 381 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill Osborne Media (December 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0078822335
• ISBN-13: 978-0078822339
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,729,182 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars how not to write a book, August 29, 2002

By	Roedy Green (Victoria, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is highly irritating for eight reasons:

1. It constantly tries to SELL you on VRML. Every tenth word is
"exciting".

2. It tells you all sorts of irrelevant stuff, like VMRL 1.0,
early VRML history.

3. It gives almost no examples.

4. It has almost no illustrations of what the VRML will render to.

5. It reads like a W3C reference manual. It constantly presumes you already know everything so there is no need to explain anything.

6. Here is an example of some prose that tells you that you must write "Shape { geometry Sphere" in that order.

"For geometry nodes to appear to the viewer, they must be contained by a Shape node and they can only appear in a geometry field of a Shape node. Geometry nodes can't be children of group nodes because they aren't leaf nodes. Geometry nodes, therefore,must be contained by Shape nodes. The shape node contains one Geometry node in its geometry field."

ALL THIS WITHOUT A SINGLE EXAMPLE OF WHAT THE HECK HE IS TALKING
ABOUT.

7. You come out the end not able to even do anything more complex than the two simplest W3C examples.

8. 3/4 of the book has nothing to do with how to write VRML.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Complete Book!, May 3, 2000

By	Daniel Bachmann "triztan" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This book is covering all the features of VRML, we waited long for such a work!

The Language is understandable and clear.