This time with lots of new features for you to play with, Mathieu Badimon released new version of Five3D package. Brand new Five3D 2.1 now have:

• Back Face Culling
• Flat Shading
• Z-Sorting
• Space Drawing Functions (moveToSpace, lineToSpace, curveToSpace)
• Bitmap3D Class
• Video3D Class
• Sprite2D Class
• Letter Spacing for DynamicText3D
• Text Width for DynamicText3D

This is serious, I was finally able to make my cube test work:

What can I say, thanks a lot! I can only wish myself could do some coding too

Hello again, flash 3D fans. Today you will be looking at REAL commercial grade flash 3D solutions in action:

The one on the left is recentry released Alternativa3D milestone tech demo. The one on the right is not so recently released Electric Oyster engine demo, but neverless I enjoy it too much to not include it in this post

That’s pretty much all I have to say, you don’t really need lengthy ramblings about them. Just click, sit back and enjoy the show.

Sincever I made this picture in Dec 2007, I knew I am going to use it again Guys at revolver3d.com apparently have released their “commercial grade” FreeSpin flash 3D engine yesterday and, to celebrate the release, they posted an announcement on Papervision mailing list. Needless to say that their announcement received heavy backfire immediately.

I could not find any pricing info on FreeSpin site, but their examples and documentation sections reveal nothing that could not already be done with existing free engines. It will suffice to say that their claimed “correct representation of the vast majority (if not all) of 3D models and scenes… without disappearing polygons and/or flawed sorting” fails to work even in their simplest example.

Come to think about it, all of this hype just two weeks after another, much more impressive, commercial engine goes open source. To conclude, these guys have a long way to go before they start making serious money with it.

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.

Dennis Ippel, one of the Sandy3D developers, just released his Blender export script. for Sandy3D, but also Away3D and Papervision 1.7.

Check it here and let your comments there!

This Blender (free 3D modelisation tool) export script is a possibility to generate native 3D objects (no parsing required), as the Seraf AS3 geom exporter is doing with 3DS Max .

Good job Dennis!

We are pleased to announce the 3.0.1 official release!

From the previous release announcement the team worked a lot to bring new cool stuff and fix the few bugs users have found.

The complete list of changes is available here : http://www.flashsandy.org/changes_3_0_1

Go to the download page, and grab the very latest version: DOWNLOAD (backward compatible) 

Update note: Some errors were introduced in the first archive zip, we have fixed that. Sorry about that. Archives are updated.

But here are the major modifications:

• Addition of the GouraudAttribute to simulate a smooth light shading to your objects. Can be used, as all attributes, with any material.
• Addition of the material interactivity. From now if you set the new enableInteractivity property to true and if you use a MovieMaterial, you’ll be able to have a basic interaction with that material content. You can use any of your movieclips or flex components as material. Mind that this is still a work in progress.

New demos are coming but for now you can see an update of the gouraud demo and a small demo of material interaction in Xavier’s blog.

Petit and Max have worked a lot of tutorials and Sandy offers now more than 25 tutorials (with sources and examples) concerning the AS3 release. You have anything you need to start with Sandy 3.0 from now.

The team and the contributors list has grown during the last month.
I’m very pleased to see the community sharing experience and ideas. That’s the real beauty of open source projects!Please read this page : how to contribute to Sandy3D project, in case you are interessted in helping and wonder how to help. 

Happy 3D flash community