It’s time for more great sites that use Away3D!

Chances are, you might have seen some of these projects, as bigger names and bigger audiences are introduced to 3D in Flash. Now, without further delay, we present the latest showcase of top-class Away3D content to be released online.

23 Million people a month (and growing) are playing “Café World” on Facebook, which utilizes Away3D for its speed and flexibility. This must be one of the most visible Away3D games on the web! Café World is still in beta, but still very playable. If you have a Facebook account, you can check it out. Thanks to Timon for notifying us of this great use of Away3D!

Bandit3 is possibly the most awe-inspiringly slick use of Away3D we have seen yet! Fly around a 3D virtual city and enter buildings to discover more about this cutting edge kiteboarding company.

Syerit is an agency that went all out with this project. What other company has a site where you feel like you are playing Quake, solving puzzles, listening to Heavy metal, and fighting a Boss? We give this site an A++ for Away3D Awesomeness!

The zen-like Sony Vaio X series site uses Away3D page flip to switch between the sections of the website. The idea behind this is that the Vaio X is as light as a regular paper notebook. Also, keep an eye on the nice ripple effect when the leaves fall in the water!

Metroid.com uses Away3D for navigation in different sections to mimic a games console user interface. It’s a simple but effective use of 3D, that compliments Nintendo’s famous 3D Metroid games.

Freedent renders a realtime juicy-looking Freedent package for a retro feel at the same time. Congratulations for winning the FWA award!

Adidas uses a 3d skybox in Away3D to create an immersive navigation system. Click around, and see the near perfect transition from Away3D to video! A truly  amazing effect

Terminator Skynet Research DCP is an AIR application that uses Away3d to render assorted Flash 3D visualizations. Will our application interfaces really look like this in the future? Resist or be Terminated!

Doritos’ ID3 has a few minigames that use Away3D to complement the cinematic feel of this interactive role-playing adventure. The east-end gangster style is entertaining, and almost as cheesy as Nacho flavored chips!

Tetrapak uses a realtime Away3D animated rabbit to be your website host. How can you get a 3D rabbit to move in flash without pre-rendered movie clips and splitting hares?  It is possible thanks to the many tools Away3D has for making complex 3D animations and models a stroll in the park.

Whaboo – “what about you?” is a social, cultural and emotional entertainment place. It uses Away3D to create a multi-dimensional browser enabled place where people can play games to find others and discover new things. Whaboo uses Away3D, what about you?

If you can’t wait for that jolly time of year, check out this neat 3D Flash Holiday Calendar that a emulates a cardboard toy calendar. Simple and lighthearted, it is a great use of 3D to reproduce real world interactivity in Flash.

Congratulations to all the creators of these web sites and games! We are happy to see Away3D being used in so many original ways. If you haven’t yet tried the 3rd dimension, download the library and join the Away3D group to get yourself started and open up a whole new world of possibilities.

The Away3D Team

Popularity: 97% [?]

Away3D has got a shiny new suit thanks to Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender, with a completely new set of material shaders and filters that offer more detail than ever before.

Written by recent new recruit and pixel-maestro David Lenaerts, the shaders offer a vast array of new options and shading techniques, all at the pixel level. For more detailed information on the various shader types, you can read David’s post over at www.derschmale.com.

Point source lights can now be used with these type of shader thanks to the parallel processing nature of Pixel Bender, giving an extra level of realism to specular maps, environment shading and even the standard phong shader. Each image in this post links to a demo that showcases the possibilities on offer – from multi-pass shaders that allow more than one lightsource, to normal mapping with specular maps for highly textured surfaces.

All demos come with source files that can be viewed and downloaded from the right-click menu in the Flash movie. These sources need to be compiled with the latest 3.4.2 release in the fp10 branch of the SVN trunk. It is worth noting that this is officially a dot release, meaning that the code is still experimental and may change before the next major release of 3.5. We are keen to get feedback on the new materials and their use before we commit to a final source structure, and would be very interested to hear what the community opinion is, either in the comments or on our mailing list. Speaking of which, if you’re not already a member, what are you waiting for?! Sign up and join the discussion.

Enjoy the new (dot) release!

The Away3D Team

Popularity: 80% [?]

For a long time, Away3D has been about the pursuit of rendering high-quality, realtime 3D in Flash. However, for the same amount of time, there has been a completely different set of skills emerging around the creation of the 3D content itself, to get the best out of the engine. In the pursuit of 3D FOR Flash, very little has been done towards producing a common set of tools that can be reused and applied to any project. Awaybuilder allows a certain amount of extra control to the designer, but for someone with little or no programming skills, how best do you deliver to a Flash developer the content he/she needs to get a good result in Away3D?

Prefab3D v1.0
Fabrice Closier, core member of the Away3D team, has today released a tool that should help answer that question. It is built on over two years experience creating top quality 3D content in Away3D. If you are a Flash designer or an experienced Flash developer working on Flash 3D projects, this application might become your best friend!

Release 1

Prefab3D can be downloaded for free as an AIR application. Many features still under development haven’t made the 1.0 release, but as you will notice, there is a little button in the main menu that says: “check update”… At present, the tool can import all model formats supported by Away3D, and allows you to export as an AS3 class or OBJ file, ready for insertion into your Away3D project.

Quick start

For a full list of features and some information on how to get started with the tool, head over to the Prefab3D homepage. More documentation and tutorials should be coming your way soon!

Popularity: 82% [?]

Filesize and framerate are generally two of the biggest concerns when using a 3d framework in Flash. Many a mail,  comment and blog has written the relative merits of one engine over another in these terms. Everyone wants more for less, faster for smaller, better for cheaper. In fact, we would go as far as saying you’re quite a demanding lot! Well, there is lite (sic) at the end of the tunnel. And thankfully it isn’t an oncoming train, but a brand new Away3D engine that will change the way you use 3d in Flash 10.

What Away3D Lite is is the fastest and smallest fully featured 3d engine in Flash to date.

Currently weighing in at under 25K, Away3D Lite can be used in projects with the most stringent bandwidth restrictions. No problem for use in banners, widgets, thumbnails… anything where filesize is a priority. But the biggest single feature offered by the new engine is it’s speed. Current tests clock framerates up to 4 times faster than the standard Away3D library. And with more frames-per-second comes the potential for more polygons, more accessible content on slower machines, and more processing power left for other areas of a Flash application.

Away3D Lite is not meant as a replacement for the standard Away3D libraries. Because of it’s use of the native 3D features in the Flash 10 Player, Away3D Lite is Flash 10 only, so the development of Away3D 2.5 & 3.5 will continue as usual. These engines are more of a workhorse for many different purposes and with many different features, while Away3D Lite offers the choice to be fast and small at the sacrifice of features. This is not to say that you can’t do anything with Away3D Lite! The list of main supported features in 1.0 includes:

• 3DS, MD2, Collada & Metasequoia loaders
• Bones animation
• Viewport clipping
• 3d mouse events
• All standard primitive types
• All standard camera types
• All standard material types
• Template classes for quick and easy setup

Plus, you will already know how to use Away3D Lite if you’ve used Away3D! Everything is where you’d expect, and there have only been very minor changes made to some property names, which in time will most likely percolate back through the various engines.

The following demos are all available as source files from the Away3DLite examples folder in the svn, or on the downloads page, in both flex/fdt/flashdevelop and cs4 formats.

There is also a complete set of documentation files available from a new livedocs folder here.

Finally, this release has been thoroughly checked for bugs and errors, but as always, we cannot perform miracles! If you do happen to stumble across something that shouldn’t be, please let us know so that we can fix the problem. Make sure you JOIN OUR GROUP for updates!

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d Team

Popularity: 100% [?]

Now that Away3D supports the creation of 3d vector text fields, aligning and animating text fields along 3D curves has been one of the big todos on our list. You can now experiment with our first attempts on a solution for achieving this, using latest sources from the 3.4.1 FP10 version of Away3D. Two demos have been created to showcase this new feature and you can see them in action by clicking on the images. sources are available in the right click menu of the demos, or directly here and here.

A core element like Segment or Face can be used to define a 3D bezier path, and this information is used by a new class AlignToPath (from the geom package), to perform the transformation on any mesh object. The class works by transforming an axis on the mesh’s local coordinate system to the space defined by the path, resulting in a pretty cool ‘warping’ effect. This is convenient especially for text, since the deformation is done globally to the transformed mesh, and hence info like kerning, leading, etc. is preserved.

Take a look and feel free to provide us feedback on this experimental feature!

The Away3d Team

Popularity: 97% [?]

The Away3d 2.4 & 3.4 update has been released, with a completely revamped examples section, for both Flash 9 (2.4) & Flash 10 (3.4) versions. To grab your copy, head over to the svn or go straight to the downloads section for a zip of sources and examples.

many new features have been added to this release, including:

• Vector graphics and fonts support.
• Typed-checked loader support.
• Geometry modifiers for exploding, welding, mirroring…
• Depth material for creating depth masks.
• Normalmap and Bumpmap generators from geometry.
• Light pre-baking on textures.

plus the usual stability improvements and a ton of bugfixes. Documentation will soon be updated at away3d.com/livedocs

Special thanx must go to Guojian Wu of wu-media.com for his excellent new as3 library swfvector, which allows you to convert any shape outline or textfield in a swf into as3 data. This is used to great effect in the new release, easily enabling the drawing of textfields and shapes in 3d.

The examples interspersing this post can be accessed by clicking on their images – each comes with it’s own source which can be downloaded by selecting “View Source” in the right-click menu. Or you can download these and a ton of other examples (both .as files and .fla files) by going to away3d.com/downloads. The Basic_Swf example also uses the excellent as3dmod library (which you can download from here) for producing the bend effect. Now you can twist and deform vector graphics in 3d, thanx to as3dmod, swfvector and Away3d 2.4 / 3.4 :D

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d Team

Popularity: 97% [?]

As more developers embrace Away3D as their Flash 3D engine of choice, the amount of quality 3D content in Flash is on the increase! Several recent websites using the Away3D engine have won FWAs (Favorite Website Awards). With now over 1,000 members in our support group, make sure you are signed up to receive the latest information on upcoming releases, as well as top notch developer support from our dedicated team.

FWA WINNER: http://www.therelapse.com/ (June 5, 2009)
Eminem’s new album has broken records, and this amazing interactive adventure website lets you discover and immerse yourself in Eminem’s sick musical world:

FWA WINNER: Intel meintru3D (March 31, 2009)
Intel’s meintru3D site let’s you create your own animated avatar, mess around with it, and send to friends. Developed by the Rokkan  agency. Fun!

FWA WINNER: http://coke.pl/lato/ (May 24, 2009)
Take a light-hearted 3D stroll in the country in this comic Coca-Cola website:

FWA WINNER: http://www.bananacafe.com.br/ (June 17, 2009)
Check out the slick physics and novel ideas on this virtual newspaper site:

FWA WINNER: http://www.coketeens.com.br/promocao (April 25, 2009)
We’ve mentioned this Coca-Cola site in a previous post, and happy to see it win a FWA finally:

FWA WINNER:  Toyota IQ Virtual Test Drive (February 5, 2009)
Also mentioned in a previous post, and a fully deserved win:

While the following sites haven’t won an FWA (yet?), they continue to highlight the great visual quality that can be accomplished using Away3D:

Morgan Stanley Matrix uses slick 3D Fonts with Away3D to produce a professional visual experience.

Some superb 3D User Interface ideas can be seen at AIRFORCE.com’s Supercar site:

Darc Matter is an experimental site that showcases features found in Away3D, and an interesting approach to interactive website creation:

Powerflasher’s “PDF Book 3D” tool uses Away3D to breathe fresh air into your run-of-the-mill 2D page flip book viewer:

The 951 site uses Away3D to create a cool photo gallery on a  disco ball. If you own the legendary glasses, you can even post your own profile:

Congratulations go out to all FWA winners, and thanks to all creators of Flash 3D content above for choosing Away3D!

The Away3D Team

Popularity: 81% [?]

Popularity: 71% [?]

Sometimes coming from only one side of a problem restricts your view on the best way to evolve. In recent experiments with the latest Flash10 player, we have been testing how starting from a native cs4 approach fares when constructing a 3d framework, and have discovered a few interesting facts about Flash 10’s renderer. Some of these nuggets include the following:

1. DisplayObject sorting is a much faster option than triangle sorting.
2. Fixed length Vector data stores are faster than linked lists when it comes to manipulating large data sets.
3. Sorting using index references is much faster (and easier) than ordering screenvertex vectors
4. …

The above demo is one such test, and nicely illustrates where we feel Away3d is going after the textfields/shapes merge that will be version 2.4. Click to add more globes – speeds vary between machines but it seems most that have tried the test can manage up to 20,000 unsorted triangles, still running at 30fps.

Moving you mouse to the right or left side of the screen will switch the current z-sort algorithm on or off, and you can see with higher numbers of triangles there is a significant performance drop when sorting is activated. This uses a brute-force method  – in more recent tests it seems a better approach is to sort in convex groups, and we will hopefully be able to post more on this soon.

The Away3d Team

Popularity: 77% [?]

Recent site launches around the globe show Away3D is fast becoming the online 3D framework of choice for major international company content. Here are the highlights of what has been an inspiring first quarter of 2009.

Project dragonfly is an experimental Autodesk tool for designing room interiors. The name on the site pretty much say it all in terms of quality, but don’t take our word for it – take a look for yourself:

For those that don’t know, Autodesk are the creators of world renowned 3D Sofware such as Maya, 3D Studio Max, and Soft Image. The high quality of the room interiors in dragonfly is possible thanks to a custom built server-rendering system that allows extremely detailed models to be rendered direct into the 3D scene. More information on the process behind this and other dragonfly features can be found by visiting a ‘making of’ youtube video playlist here. We are honored to have Autodesk pick Away3D as their online 3D visualization tool.

The BBC celebrated their regain of F1’s sports coverage this year with a plethora of new and innovative content, including their very own Away3D application in the form of the F1 Circuit Guides. This is an in-depth tour of all tracks on the 2009 calendar, combining 3D flythroughs, driver lap videos, race comments, images and more.

The application was a BBC commission from Monterosa Productions, with Away Media providing Flash 3d production and consultancy services. The extensive extrusion and custom shape creation packages in Away3D gave a huge hand to the track creation process, and more tracks are being created over the course of the season so stay tuned! Read more about the project here and here.

Brazilian agency Gringo have released a surreal 3D playland in the form of Happy Me, a kids site commisioned for Coca Cola. The game plays exactly to the strength Away3D offers, with a cartoon world to explore and customisations you can perform on your slightly ogrish character.

To launch the new iQ car from Toyota, digital agency North Kingdom (with 3D assistance from Play With Motion) have created a beautiful minisite that can be seen here. Combining static video with 3D interaction in a captivating and seamless journey, you can put the iQ through various ‘test drives’ of it’s features.

Disney recently launched the American Idol Experience website as a precursor to their new attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park. The site uses a combination of pre-rendered 3D video sequences with interactive Away3D panels to create a virtual tour of the ride. The idea of a website that houses a virtual re-creation of a theme park attraction that allows participants the chance to pretend to be on a show intended for public participation is a little surreal, but the site’s subtle use of interactive 3D is executed flawlessly.

Finally, Norway’s largest online marketplace Finn.no have just launched a new Street-viewer service powered by Away3D. The application allows you to walk along the streets of the Norwegian cities Oslo and Trondheim, and consists of  more than 120.000 panorama locations. From the map interface, clicking on any one of the blue dots will open the viewer at that location.

We are grateful to everyone who sent in their links for inclusion in our showcase section! If you have a site that you would like us to showcase, please tell us more by getting in contact via our mailing list.

Popularity: 99% [?]

The Flash10 branch has recently received the first of it’s optimising updates that deals with some of the problems shading presented to us in the past. Flash 9 is restricted by blendmodes and layers that mean a huge overhead on extra drawing operations and filters to create shading effects. With Flash 10 however,  Pixel Bender allows us to solve the problem very neatly and with a significant speed boost!

The above demo shows some of what is possible with the update: normalmapping with ambient, diffuse and correctly normalised specular shading, without the need for layers. As if that’s not enough, a further Pixel Bender shader is applied to the view to create a HDR (High Dynamic Range) effect on the highlights, something usually seen in much more 3d-rich console games. Special thanx go to Eddie Carbin for donating an excellent normalmapped mustang model, and David Lenaerts for writing the HDR filter.

The demo is available for download (along with the latest flash10 version of Away3d) in the zip files on the downloads page, or direct from the flash10 branch of the svn.  You can also access the demo source via the right-click menu in the flash movie, or go straight to the code here. Enjoy the new release!

Popularity: 92% [?]