As more and more people discover the potential of 3d in Flash, the versatility of the Away3D framework is beginning to show. Agencies and individuals alike are using it as their engine of choice, and producing some very cool content as illustrated by the following selection of projects!

Discovery Channel uses Away3D on a Flash Video Game “Solar Symphony”, where you interact with the Planets and sounds.

Away3D can be seen in use on the Square Enix (of Final Fantasy fame) members website. Now you can choose your avatar when you login in, and modify it realtime in 3D.

The Strangers Movie site uses a good dose of Away3D and video materials. Try the experience, it’s pretty spooky!

Cadbury’s “A Glass and a Half Full” website uses Away3D and 3D video renderings to drop you into a surreal world. A great concept for a 3D website, and the experience is pretty realistic!

As well as this, you can do some cool Truck modding in the Tricked Out Trucks section.

While we are on the subject of trucks, check out the revamped Brahmamobile.
A fantastic Away3D upgrade!

We’d like to thank Flashkit for the mention last month of the new Away3D 2.0 release on their homepage, and flashmagazine for running a great tutorial on their site for getting started with Away3D code. And of course, all of the people involved in the projects above for creating such cool showcase material!

The Away3D Team

AWAY3D 2.0 IS HERE!

Our new release may bring out the explorer in you, with features allowing a lot more expansive 3d possibilities. Here we present an atmospheric oddessey taking the reliable formula of a crash-landed spaceship and an alien world… Green Planet.

Now you can realize your 3D world like never before in Flash.

Some of the new features in 2.0 include:

• Simulated phong shading (with blinn-phong specular highlights)
• Environment-mapped materials
• Normal-mapped materials (an open source first for Flash)
• Z-depth filter for large outdoor scenes
• Fog filter
• Straight-to-bitmap rendering for fast scaled views
• Surface caching for fast rendered lights
• Package refactor for easier learning of basic classes

Full update details have been posted on the AWAY3D mailing list. You can get the source files by accessing our svn repository or going to our downloads page

Handling the rendering of over 13000 polygons, 16 animated and interactive models with surface tracking, and a cool soundtrack composed by Atom(bang), this is a demo unlike anything else… so turn up your speakers and enjoy a new kind of ride into the realm of Away3D 2.0!

The Away3D Team.

More info on our group here…

We’ve now completed the main part of the refactoring work on rendering pipeline for upcoming Away3d 1.9.5. Now user has possiblity to render either to a sprite (SpriteView3D) or select the BitmapView3D which renders to a Bitmap. This can then be used as a normal DisplayObject or you can request a direct access to the rendered output for post processing etc.

Jalava, our new team member, quickly whipped together some post processing effects from using evoengine from Evoflash and slapped it together with Away3d.

Here is the result.Bitmap Rendering Demo

As you can see, it is pretty easy to add different post processing effects on the away3d engine when you can get everything rendered to a bitmap.

In here we are doing about 20 fullscreen bitmapData#draw calls to render postprocessing plus we are rendering about 1200 polygons fully textured with precision bitmap material.

the Away3d Team

If your looking for somewhere to relax (and I know we are!) after a hard day coding with Away3d, then why not try the latest online virtual-zen environment: The Away3d Temple

The beautiful ambient music is composed by Atom(bang)

This demo weights only 204 kb with fully code generated meshes, and combines Flash’s power to reuse, alter, and mix sources with the latest Away3d tools.

We are busy building tutorials and the source of this demo will be available soon across a series of posts in a new section of the away3d site.

Many of the new features in the latest Away3d version are present in this demo, which is part of the reason it will be used as an extended tutorial. A full feature update will be announced on our mailing list, but the highlight additions include:

• new AnimatedBitmapMaterial for processor-saving animations
• new extrusions classes for creating many different shapes on the fly
• new BitmapFileMaterial for automatic loading of a material
• added autoloading textures functionality in collada and 3ds importers
• new extended 3ds importer
• added 2d rotation on Sprite2d and Sprite2DDir
• new importer for google sketchup (kmz) files
• improved md2 importer
• added md2 animated to as3 exporter

The 1.9.4 source has been tagged and can be downloaded from the svn repository, or as a zip file from the Away3d downloads section.

If you would like to follow the progress of future Away3d updates, please feel free to join our mailing list

Hope you enjoy!

the Away3d Team

After straight segments extrusion it was time to play with the rounded stuff.
This Lathe class allows you to rotate 2 or more 3D points arround the axis of your choice or using an offset if needed, you can add more rotations in order to generate springs, phonecords or screws… and like the segment extrude class it supports multiple textures and you can add thickness to the geometry as well. Very handy to show some exploded views of parts, educational stuff… or some melons!

This little technical demo shows the most common use of the class. Press on the model to change the points randomly.

For this one: Lathe+tweek properties+md2 generator = 30 sec work!

If you wonder why there are no forks or spoons in the situation demo, that’s because I wanted to use exclusively the Lathe class to build it!

All the objects you see here are just generated with one line of code and an array of Number3D’s.

Of course, the idea is to use other forms, models, primitives but…. I just couldn’t resist!

More extrudes classes are coming…

PS: Jerome, it was too late to couple it with WoW, will try it in next one!

Note: For some weird reasons, these demo’s will play only with the latest player installed on your machine. (9,0,115,0). As soon as I’ve figured out why, I’ll update them.

In order to build a complex scenery and keep it low poly, you need to have good 3D skills and a good modeller. For many that’s just too much to ask. As a result, I read threads everyday, on lists and forums, on how to load those elephant xml files…

I think it’s just bad practice to build whole scenes that way, specially when it comes to Flash.
And here comes the problem:
What else?

Personally I think that’s one the biggest challenges, offering tools that helps to reduce loading problems and offer more flexibility to the way we work.

So here’s my first contribution in that direction, this demo shows one of the classes I’m working on.
The class allows you to create extrudes from points, like a fence around a house, walls, a city block, charts elevation, some surrounding forest, sky trips or … a maze! You can define elevation on 3 axis, thickness, add one or more materials per segments, be able to generate one mesh from one or more point definitions, subdivisions per segments so you can control the polygon count, be able to decide if texture(s) covers whole geometry or per segments, you can hide some sides…
Last but not least, this option costed me almost a total rewrite of the class: it respects the thickness no matter the angle of the next segment.

Here is a 2d representation of the algorithm.

Of course one class is not enough… so more are coming!

In order to animate in Flash3D you need to use pretty advanced 3D tools to generate and export animation data. For many it’s just a bridge too far.
And even for the professionals, it often cost too much development time. And because of this, many choose not to animate at all. I think that’s a shame.

During the last weeks I’ve worked on many new features for Away’s native animation system, and together with other team mates have spend lots of time looking at ways to ensure easyness of use for the pro user as for the starter.

I’ve tried here to build in a few of those handy features in this demo:

- Path animation system. Both the camera are on a path in this case.
- The animated hummingbird is animated automatically by Away’s animation system, (as you will see bellow with the cube example, it’s very easy to accomplish the same thing natively now).
- Target following: The camera follows the bird according to its position.
- AlignToPath: Both camera is automatically oriented as it moves on the path.
- And of course the tiling feature in action.

Note that this demo is not using Away’s 1.9 but my good old workhorse dev version of the engine, so expect about 30-35% more speed with the 1.9.x and higher! Why? Simply because we haven’t ported the tiling in the latest version yet!

And of course i want to thank Peter Kapelyan for the HB model, Meowza for the bird texture and not to forget the beautifull music done by Atom(bang)

Here a little demo that shows how the bird is being animated. In this case i use cubes, just to show you how easy this is. Just click the cube to see it.

private function makeBoxeAnimation():void
{
var mat:IMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(myBitmadata, {});

var cube = new Cube({width:350, height:350, depth:350});
var cube2 = new Cube({width:500, height:50, depth:250});
var cube3 = new Cube({width:150, height:450, depth:50});
var cube4 = new Cube({width:650, height:250, depth:550});

_anim = new Animator(cube, [{vertices:cube2.vertices, prefix:”cube01″},
{vertices:cube3.vertices, prefix:”cube02″},
{vertices:cube4.vertices, prefix:”cube03″},
{vertices:cube2.vertices, prefix:”cube04″}] ,
{material:mat, y:0, x:0,z:0,bothsides:false});
this.scene.addChild(_anim);

_anim.play({prefix:”cube”, smooth:true, loop:true, fps:.5});

//let the fun begin
stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, this.refreshScreen);
}

private function refreshScreen(event:Event):void
{
_anim.rotationX += .5;
_anim.rotationY += 1.5;
_anim.rotationZ += .5;
this.view.scene.updateTime();
this.view.render();
}

Fabrice

Gosh,

I never knew coding can be fun! Of course I am interested in making games, so I needed some smoke and particles. I made my last demo ALOT better, but because I spent like 1 week staring at it (yes time wasted), instead of coding- just staring! I have concluded that making games in Away3d is not only fun, but addictive :)

So here is a better example of Depth of Field, Filters, Blendmode (the smoke), a Constant Emitter (the smoke), and even some cool TIME-STOP feature so you get to catch all that goodness, and get to see the correct Z sorting between the particles. Ok now that I can breathe after that last sentence- click away! and have fun :)

Please leave a comment, I will appreciate it!

One of the things I was missing the most in the API was the ability to tile the textures. This allows you to repeat an image on a model with no overlaps and no gaps. The best illusion can be of course achieved by using a seamless image.
Sea surface, deserts, endless roads etc… As you will discover in this demo, it looks like infinite planes are coming to Flash.

Making a material with tiling properties is pretty easy too:
var mat:IMaterial = new BitmapMaterial(myBitmapdata,{ repeatH:2, repeatW:2});

I’m already curious to see what will be done with this new feature!

Fabrice

This shows Away3D version 1.9 in action with REALTIME filters (blurring) on each object.
Make sure you get the latest version, which has the ownCanvas property.

This feature is pretty awesome, so check out what I made!

Click to make an explosion!

BlendMode Version!