Seems like yesterday was busy day for flash 3D world. Away3D has just released v2, that includes all the stuff they were carefully hiding from us since 2007 fall. Release comes with kick-ass alien planet demo:
Well, Away3D has really gone far away from PV3D now. As Rob wrote before, they “no longer measure success with a Papervision yardstick”.
Congrats to Away team!
Two months after unofficial port, Mathieu Badimon finally took his time to make official release today, along with typography tools.
This is certainly one of most compact engines (and so is very easy to start working with), with some unique features, such as 3D vector drawing and text support. Now, rewritten in AS3, it is probably fast enough to handle very complex scenes, but also very limited dynamically because of fixed rendering order.
This release comes with promise of v2.1 in coming weeks, so let’s see what comes next.
Get Five3D 2.0 here.
Recently Anggie Bratadinata has posted Light3D Explorer on Away3D mailing list which, to quote Peter Kapelyan, does very good job in demonstrating concepts that are just too hard to explain in words. So, to provide similar service to our users, we have converted light explorer to Sandy:
I hope you’ll find it useful.
P.S.: meanwhile, we have done some work to speed up smooth lighting in coming 3.0.3, so keep an eye on release annoncements ;)
Dmitri just launched some new demos of his library and Sandy rendering engine.
There are some MD2 animated models with sound. Cast3D manage all the synchronization of the animation and sound, Sandy manage the display. Cool team result!
Don’t forget to check Cast3D library homepage, some cool updates are coming!
Max Pellizzaro continue his great set of tutorials, and he is now introducing WOW, 3D physic engine, and its integration with Sandy3D.
Check them out :
I’m happy to announce Cast3D, an open source 3D animation framework for Flash written in AS3 by Dmitri Sviridov.
Let’s Dmitri present himself his baby:
The foundation is a multi key-framed geometrical and camera ( point of view) animation. Cast3D supports geometry and texture morphing, skin animation, 3D sound, animated movie and video. A number of animation interpolation splines is implemented to provide smooth and natural motion, like Bezier, TCB, Hemite(cubic), Cosine and Linear.
Right now, Cast3D is still really young, and need some experimented 3D animator to share some 3DS animations (Collada will be supported soon) in order to improve the library.
So please, if you feel interessted and confortable in that field, go to the forum and drop him an email or answer to the Cast3D announcement topic.
OCast3D is independent from the rendering engine. Currently Sandy 3.0.x series are fully supported, as well as PV3D
I’ve been pleased to help Dmitri setting up this project (website and other small things), and to see that kind of amazing effort. Now it is your time to help making that dream become even more real 
Among the 3.0.2 new features, the new lightening system may be confusing for beginners. For that reason, we have created 2 new tutorials (mind the 30 others) to explain that advanced feature :
Sandy Team.