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!

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!

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

We are proud to announce a new release of the Sandy library.

A lot of good stuff are coming with that 3.0.2, but let’s talk about the most interessting part, the new features :

• ParserStack to preload and parse several files sequentially
• Phong shading
• CelShading
• Sprite2D/3D attributes management
• Sprite2D/3D new properties plus event managment
• Material tiling
• Sound3D object
• Light color managment in shading attributes
• Some major bug fixes and memory optimization.
• Performance has also been improved up to 20% in some cases.

Also a new component, the Sandy extension for Flash CS3–help book / code highlighting from Dan! You’re gonna to love it, so useful…

Even if we focused a lot on not breaking your existing code, there’s few behaviour modification in order to improve the general API.

To see the complete list of changes, check that page.

And to celebrate this release, Makc prepared a very cool demo illustrating some of the new features.

Have a look, especially in full screen mode.

But Sandy is not only some new features, but also some new tutorials and new tools. Here is the list of the new tutorials :

• Simplest Sandy example, your first 3D sphere in 3 lines of code!
• An amazing set of tutorials from Arthur V and Max. This tutorial starts from the modelisation of your model in 3DS, will all the tips to have a good export, and next, all the Sandy side code to have an advanced use of that model in Flash. Check the first tutorial right here.
• Fire effect using Grant Skinner component
• and much more, check our complete tutorial list with at least 30 tutorials to learn all the tips.

A special thanks to Makc for his hard work, but also Petit and Dan for the great documentation effort, Collin Cusce for the celshading material (with Makc’s help) and Daniel (aka Delta 9) for his great Sound3D class.

Once again the whole community effort is fantastic, and make all of that possible and today available for you, freely.

Happy 3D !

Sandy team and committers.

WOW Engine has finally been released.

Basically it is an AS3 3D physic engine, which fits with all the available 3D rendering engine. Basically WOW makes the physic computations and place the different objects and the 3D engine display the objects. That’s why there’s no real dependencies.

Jérôme Birembaut the author of WOW (and the creator of the first amazing Sandy 3D demos, like the kitty one) offers an adaptation of the great APE 2D physic engine to a 3D context.

Current limitations of the engine make it really useful for demos and effects, but not yet in the real game purpose. But we can be sure this will evolve rapidly.

I’m glad to have contributed to this project, even if I haven’t done 10% everything I wanted ^^

Anyway, it deserve a look and a try. Hopefully more tutorials to come.

I’d also remind a physic demo that a forum member did at the 3.0 release, which is also very interessting based on a SAT approach: