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% [?]