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Flash Tools for Developers: 3D Function Grapher - Outline of the 3D Function Grapher Guide

Author(s): 
Doug Ensley, Barbara Kaskosz

The following outline describes what can be accomplished by following the 3D Function Grapher guide after downloading the source files to your machine with Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8 installed.

  1. Introduction. Download and unzip the relevant files including the documented source code and the detailed pdf file with instructions for customization.
  2. Elements of the 3D Grapher's fla file. An overview of the structure of the source code.  This section should be supplemented with the article Flash Tools for Developers: Function Grapher, also available in the MathDL Flash Forum.
  3. Customizing appearance of the 3D Grapher.  Instructions for resizing the graph cube and the underlying graphing board using Template 1, and instructions for changing colors of background, border, axes, and labels using Template 2.  Instructions are also given for changing the choices for opacity and preprogrammed examples in Template 2.
  4. The basic outline of the program. To change the actual functionality of the program, one needs to understand the organization of the code. In this section of the guide, we explain the functions prepGraph(), drawGraph(), and procInput(), and we give a technical overview of the 3D Engine used to render the graphs.
  5. The Description of Custom Classes.  This section gives a technical description of the five custom classes contained within the package edu.uriship.math.grapher3d. We include it here for completeness.

Doug Ensley, Barbara Kaskosz, "Flash Tools for Developers: 3D Function Grapher - Outline of the 3D Function Grapher Guide," Convergence (May 2006)