UPDATE: You can find the above slide deck on Slideshare here.

PaperVision3D lets you create a Material instance of type MovieMaterial, this can latter be added as the child to the Plane on which you would want to project your Flex component. When working with PaperVision3D, the instance creation starts with BasicView and ends with the Plane, and this is how the chain looks, BasicView -> Scene -> ViewPort -> Plane -> Material.

If you wish to try out the demo, firstly get the marker PDF printed and then go here. Below is the source code attached to explore and play around.

Simple AR Flex Component Demo Source Code

To try out, lets look at embedding few fonts which I wish to use in Flex project for styling the label text. Open Flash CS3, and follow the steps to create an SWC in which fonts are embedded.

1. Embed a font by going to the library, and in the top right corner drop down, select “New Font…”. In the dialogue box, select the font that you want to embed, and give it a library name.
2. Then, in the library, right click the font, and select “Linkage…”.
3. Select “Export for ActionScript”, and give the font a class name, I gave here as com.thepixelcode.fonts.EmbedSensation.
4. While exporting make sure that the option Export SWC is selected, you can name at this point the SWC as FontsLibrary.swc.

Fire up your Flex Builder 3 and follow this steps :

1. Create a Flex project called SampleFontTest and click Next.
2. Let the output folder be bin-debug and click Next.
3. In the Main Application Field, I usually prefer to name it as index.mxml, this is because when hosting on servers, its easy to deploy through scripts (don’t need t change name or do a mapping).
4. Now in the Navigator you should find your flex project, and in the libs folder add the FontsLibrary.swc.
5. Look at the code below for  index.mxml where during the project initialization the fonts are registered and can be used as fontNames for labels or text.

import com.thepixelcode.fonts.*;

//Registering fonts embedded in FontsLibrary.swc during initialization

public function init():void {

Font.registerFont(com.thepixelcode.fonts.EmbedGoudyTwenty);
Font.registerFont(com.thepixelcode.fonts.EmbedKomika);
Font.registerFont(com.thepixelcode.fonts.EmbedMothproof);
Font.registerFont(com.thepixelcode.fonts.EmbedSensation);

}

You can find the source code below to try and test, there are other ways to register the font, but would simply increase code or add would need to add CSS definitions for styles.

SampleTestFont Source Zip

As a usual practice, I thought it would be great to first place a tutorial structure so that a systematic and adaptive learning material can delivered through my blog and the capabilities of the users can be leveraged from one tutorial to another. What I always believed and implemented during the training session at work is a famous saying by Albert Einstein “I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”

This tutorials are targeted for individuals who wish to take step-by-step approach and learn each module every week and practice them and play around with it. I plan to start the tutorial series with the title called “Learning ActionScript 3″ and this is how it will be organized. Every saturday morning I would post the blog, which would cover certain topic, and after going through the boring yet essential theory which I wrote, you can pull up the attached walkthrough codes and discover and mess with it over the week.

The Learning ActionScript3 would be initially structured much like the Adobe Certification Program courseware (but not the content), and the extensions module like working with Cairngorm, BlazeDS or LCDS would be based on what I use for internal training (no Esberi won’t hurt me). Here is what the content structure would look like:

• Introduction to Flash Player
• Introduction to Flex SDK
• Getting started with AS3
• Code syntax for AS3
• Control Structures with AS3
• OOPs with AS3

This initiative is jut not to post something on this young blog, but instead will also refine my knowledge about technologies. So happy learning !!!!