3D for iPhone Apps with Blender and SIO2: Your Guide to Creating 3D Games and More with Open-Source Software

Description

If you have ever tried to write a game with just plain openGL ES then you know that's not the way to develop a full-fledged iPhone 3D game. The path laid out in this book is the way to go. The book starts with a simple introduction to OpenGL ES to illustrate my point above. Chapter 2 is an introduction to SIO2 programming. Chapter 3 and 4 explore the Blender world and integrate the scene created in Blender into iPhone SDK via SIO2. By chapter 4, we have the "World" spinning on the iPhone device, in 3D (a wicked twist on the classic "Hello World" program, loved it). You also get a nice pat on the back from the author for making it so far! The chapter on 'Picking and Text' is excellent. The rest of the chapters does a nice job of finishing up the introduction to all areas of a 3D game. There are some errors too in the book - especially in chapter 3 - where we select the edge loop - the way described in chapter did not work for me, but referring to the Appendix on Blender helped. It is also very easy to get lost in all the intricacies of Blender and C/C++, but with a little bit of exploring it's easy to get back on track - persistence pays off. I wish the author had added an Appendix on advanced C/C++ for the features used in the book.