In 2008, “3D” was the new buzzword for Flash. We saw an increased use of Away3D as an engine for 3D flash games, as well as the use of Away3D for 3D graphics in applications. Huge improvements and additions were made to our API, and the size of the Away3D mailing list increased over threefold. Make sure you join our group to become a part of it all - it is the best place to ask questions, get tech support, keep up to date with API developments, showcase your Away3D work, and communicate directly with the Away3D team.

Last year, 3D in Flash took off, with the main 3D engines working hard to make commercially viable libraries, and even Flash itself taking a step into 3D land with the new native capabilities of Flash 10. Here are some recent publications of Away3D content that really stood out:

Fisherman’s Day has got to be one of the most polished Flash demos for a 3D game seen yet. You won’t see anything comparable made with any other Flash 3D Engine.

If you’ve played or seen Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS or Wii, you may recognize the way the scenery and terrain scroll. It’s purely ingenious, and this demo has higher resolution than a DS screen, making the effect even more impressive.

Using your mouse to walk around, you’ll notice the precise collision detection, smooth movement, and highly detailed graphics in this Flash 3D mini-world. Congratulations to dangerous-rabbits.com on a superb use of Flash and Away3D!

Intel IT MANAGER is an isometric Sims-style game with up to 100,000 triangles, interactive and animated elements per screen in certain rooms! Do you have what it takes to manage the IT department in your own virtual company?

How does a Flash 3D game handle 100,000 triangles at once? It uses Away3D’s caching system, which makes these large scenes a piece of cake. The game also takes advantage of the Away3D scene exporter, which allows you to save hundreds of objects as one compressed ActionScript file. This saves download times and costly pre-processing, ensuring the loading of 3d assets does not slow down the gameplay.

Munchiegames.com has launched three new Flash games made with the Away3D engine.

How quickly can you make a BLT sandwich, serve up spicy fries, or stuff a box of Valentine’s Day treats? The games all have some kind of food theme, with a healthy injection of flavorful graphics and oddball humour. Munchiegames.com is serving up fresh 3D Flash games just for you!

Conflict is a RTS (Real Time Strategy) Tower Defense-type game that uses Away3D and the WOW 3D Physics Engine. As an added bonus, level maps can be created by users!

Registered users of Conflict can build maps, save their score, rate other peoples creations and so on. If you don’t want to register use the following word as the login/password : shirotokoro. Now go get ‘em soldier!

The CBBC’s Escape from Scorpion Island is an immersive game where you interact with a wild 3D world around you. With video clues to find and puzzles to solve, you’ll feel like you are the star of the show! Play it now - but don’t forget to put on your insect repellent! Shortcut links to the minigames will be available soon where you’ll find more games made with Away3D, such as Escape from the Ship.

Hotels and Events.com is a website that plots upcoming arts & theatre, music, and sport events onto a 3D globe. With their innovative 3D Interface fueled by Away3D they are giving users a new navigation experience for search-based apps.

Real Aquarium is a Facebook app where you can tend to your own 3D fish in a virtual aquarium. The first 3D virtual pet on Facebook is a big step for 3D Flash apps, it shows how people can develop and create simple applications with more graphical ‘depth’ ;).

Christmas Tree is a 3D (or should that be Tree-D?) Facebook app that lets you customize your own christmas tree and then adorn it with decorations. Pick different shapes, backgrounds and coloured ornaments to make your tree as jolly as you like!

Fukhaos.com is a showcase site that takes a peek into the future of 3D Flash websites. The simple, clean graphical style and navigation give you a feeling of space, while being immersed in a 3D environment. Why would you want your Flash site to be a crowded 2D mess, when you can aim for something like this?

Last but certainly not least is the awe-inspiring AUDI VDT website by ArtificialDuck that uses Away3D to plot 3D representations of various machined parts in Flash.

This has to be the one of the best Away3D websites we’ve seen so far. It’s informative and technical with slick, clean visuals. As an addition some really great interactive mouse effects add to the 3D look and feel. Experience it for yourself here.

If you’ve not yet tried it, we hope you get your 3D Flash groove on this year! The Away3D Flash Engine is becoming bigger and better with more capabilities, features and possibilities than any other 3D Flash engine available. We are looking forward to 2009 being another great year with yet more excellent Flash 3D creations!

The Away3D Team

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 has recently seen a sudden increase in commercial use - now including areas such as Education, Gaming, and Online Applications. The following content shows a sample of what’s currently being powered by the Away3d Engine.

EffectiveUI launchs an application for the Discovery Channel called “Discovery Earth Live” which lets you visualize different scientific data on an interactive 3D globe, as well as read about news stories around the world; the data is both images and video, and you can adjust layering and opacities of different layers in real-time as the globe spins.
In otherwords: Really Awesome.
http://www.discovery.com/discoveryearthlive

Newgrounds features 3D Sugar Glider on the front page and 3D Flash Games finally become a reality on the Web.
Newgrounds is the largest and most popular Flash site on the web, and the future of Web Entertainment. Now Away3D is pushing the3D Flash Game envelope.

Play 3D Sugar Glider !

Fusebox launches Empressr, the first web-based application that lets you create, share and store presentations online.

It uses Away3D for the 3D transitions, with many more features being made.
It’s nominated for a Webware 100 award for the Best Web 2.0 sites.
www.empressor.com

Away3D has many new things coming up, please JOIN THE AWAY3D GROUP to stay updated.

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!