Hey noob here,

Curious on your thoughts about the most efficient way to have a lot of 3D sphere’s on a screen with a realistic soap bubble texture and shine in Away3D 4.0.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I can’t say how it would turn it, but try

ColorMaterial with a FresnelSpecularMethod and EnvMapMethod

EnvMapMethod will have your world reflections, FresnelSpecularMethod for highlights. Could try other specular methods as well. Water usually behaves like a fresnel effect. Getting the rainbow effect will be the hardest, not sure about that

edit: ColorTransformMethod isn’t what I thought it was, after using it on something else.

Since they are perfect spheres, and mostly transparent, I would investigate just using sprites (2D planes always facing the camera) instead of proper 3D meshes. Will probably look just as good (depending on circumstances) but perform a lot better.

or use Merge and update the spheres ref vertices. This way you have a single “bubble” mesh. one material. It would perform better than sprites and result would look way better (not faked). The dark side of this approach: you will spend more time to set it up than using sprites as Richard said.