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

JSAway is a spin-off of Away3D which provides web developers access to the high performance graphics capabilities of the engine, through JavaScript. Currently based of V2.0, JSAway exposes implementations of the API and provides other supporting functionality to allow complex scenes to be created and animated providing full interaction between the web page and the 3D scene.

JSAway is still in early development but from the examples, you can easily see it’s potential in opening up 3D on the web to different community. All the examples use the same single SWF file, while the underlying web page’s JavaScript code controls what is going on.

Some of the features of JSAway.

• JavaScript only - no ActionScript knowledge required.
• simple command reference exposes huge range of features
• all API basic primitives can be used
• basic 3D event handling
• filter based effects on objects
• simple custom tweening operations
• simple bitmap manipulation, get/set pixel and draw bitmap
• getting/setting of object properties
• material handling
• content (materials and 3D models) loading - bitmaps, sketchup, dae…..
• powerful features including lathe, extrudes, elevations, etc are supported
• custom tweening of object properties
• various automatic camera functions - object tracking, panning, etc
• simple mouse navigation controls - rotation and twisting the scene based on mouse movement

For further details and to check out the examples :-

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/examples/index.html - The examples

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/index.html - Full details and downloads

http://away3d.com/jsaway - JSAway details on Away3D

We hope you find it useful.

The Away3d Team

Away3d 2.1 bring some welcome assistance to getting starting with the engine - a revamped documentation section (now included in the svn) and a brand new demos download containing code examples which will continue to be updated as more are written.

As well as this, there are some updates to the engine that should help with general use, including:

• Simplified events model - listeners can be added using the supplied methods or with the standard addEventListener method of the EventDispatcher.
• Event types listed as static classes.
• Simplified BitmapRenderSession use.
• Object primitives have dynamic property setters that can be adjusted after instantiation.
• Merged AlphaBitmapMaterial class (all bitmapmaterials now support alpha and color properties).
• Dot3 and Enviro materials take the bitmap for shading maps as a required argument.
• Improved material access on individual sides of the cube primitive

plus the usual bug fixes and housekeeping updates.

As usual there is a new tag in the googlecode svn, and a new download zip in the downloads section.

Something else that is probably worth drawing attention to is the issues section of the googlecode repository. Our mailing list has been very successful at being used for bug reports in the past, but to prevent any future reports from being accidentally overlooked, we would urge everyone to start logging their bugs in this list.

Also, for those wanting to find a few more tutorials for Away3d, be sure to have a look at the External Site section of the tutorials page.

Enjoy the new release!

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

Away3D version 1.9.3 is now available via the svn or downloads section of away3d.com. The above demo shows some of the new capabilites of the BitmapMaterialContainer class, along with a viewable source (right-click on the background of the swf) that can be used with the 1.9.3 codebase.

The extrusion classes being worked on in the demos below are to be included in the forthcoming 1.9.4 release version

To bring in 2008, it is time for an update to the documentation for Away3D.

Other than a significant makeover, the documentation now :

• has been updated to V1.9.2
• provides a search function
• documetation can be easily managed
• links to the new wiki are included for each class
• examples will be included with the classes to make life easier
• anyone can add comments to the documentation

At present, there is still a lot of content to be added to the documentation but this is now a simple process and can be done when required - rather than having to get comments put in the code and get it all regenerated. So more information will be being added all the time - if you need to know something in particular, contact us on the mailing list.

In conjuntion with the new LIVEDOCS, Pete has done a great job and introduced an EXAMPLES page to allow anyone to post any useful Away3D snippets or complete solutions that others would benfit from. Note, these will be subject to approval by the team.

And if that wasn’t enough, there is now a site WIKI to provide yet another mechanism for use contribution. There is a link from each class in the Livedocs to a class specific wiki page. If the page doesn’t exist, create it and add to it. This again is to allow all of you to help others understand and use the API.

If you come across any issues with the livedocs, examples or wiki, let me know via the mailing list and I’ll get it seen to as soon as I can.

NOTE: Please bear in mind that these items may need tweaking and will certainly have more information added and should be considered to be in a Work-In-Progress state. More notices will be posted when things of significance happen.

Greg