Hi,

I was wondering what’s the difference between the upcoming Away3D dev tool and Prefab3D ?

Will Prefab be gradually stopped in favor of its successor ? Are they meant to exist and prosper parallelly ? Is Fabrice working on both ?

Thanks for your directional lights

what’s the difference between the upcoming Away3D dev tool and Prefab3D ?

Prefab is a personal project started in 2009 that I share with you since then.
It is free, not opensource, not sponsored. AwayBuilder is a initiative of the AwayFoundation, it is opensource and sponsored by the foundation.

Will Prefab be gradually stopped?
There is no plan on my side to stop dev it. Why should I?

Are they meant to exist and prosper parallelly?
I certainly hope so!

Is Fabrice working on both?
I’m not part of the AwayBuilder dev team. Tho contributing to the away3D lib does not make me a total stranger either:)

I like how Prefab is closely related to Away3D. It’s great to learn both at the same time, what you learn here applies 1:1 there, and reciprocally. Also the fact that it’s not supercharged in features (yet !) like 3DS Max makes it more accessible as the learning curve isn’t as steep.

But aren’t Prefab3D and AwayBuilder meant to do the same thing, in the end and once AwayBuilder is ready ?
I guess that’s the gist of my question, I don’t see where they differentiate, or if they have slightly different focuses like Maya and 3DS Max.

And the fact that Sea3D also uses a cool turtle just adds to my general confusion xD

AwayBuilder is a initiative of the AwayFoundation, it is opensource and sponsored by the foundation.

I noticed you skipped the word “free” there. :D
Could it be that there will be a paid license for those who use it commercially ?

Thanks for the replies

When AwayBuilder will be released in its 1.0 version, there will be overlap. That’s something you cannot prevent. In future iteration however there will be features added to Awaybuilder that will not perse be in Prefab and vice versa.
For instance, Prefab has exports to ThreeJS, STL generation capabilities for printing3D. These are not away3d specific and more of these “third party things” will be added in the future.

Once AwayBuilder is ready…
Let me tell you something: a 3d editor is NEVER ready!

Sea3d also having a turtle:
Prefab 1.0 was exporting the first awd 1.0 using the turtle as picto back in 2009. We used the turtle model in the early builds of away3D 1.0. It became a bit our own Utah teapot.
It was offered as native as3 class mesh and I’ve tortured this model so often in the past that I saw it as an excellent icon.

AwayBuilder will be free and opensource.

Yup I know you were the first turtle around. It’s obvious if only because their turtle has crazy extra armored shell to make it different :D

Printing in 3D is great. I don’t know if I’ll ever need it professionally but it’s great.

If you’re looking to make Prefab export cross language, have you considered exporting to Haxe ? It would possibly save you a bunch of time not having to code specifically in each and every language you target.

Anyway thanks for clearing up the differences ! Now I’ll just need to look around and figure out how Sea3D 1.5 (soon to be released) is different from Prefab and AwayBuilder

So, is it safe to say that Prefab will continue to grow, and be related to Away3d as it is now? Can we count on this great app to be with us in future, because I dont know how AwayBuilder will turn out, but for now I am sure that Prefab is my best co-tool for building with Away.
Keep Prefab alive and kicking!!

@varDacha.
As a matter of fact, I’m currently in the middle of a massive update that I hope to release in a not too far future… This update will bring lots of new features and enhancements with it. Because of the amount of work that this update brings, I wasn’t able to push a monthly update as I usually do.

Prefab is for sure alive and kicking, it will continue to grow and of course support Away3D and 3D in general.

I’m very proud to read that Prefab is an important part in your workflow!