Bartek Drozdz released today an early version of his AS3DMod library.

This library will allow Sandy3D user to apply some modifiers to 3D objects geometry.

What are Modifiers?

let’s quote Bartek

Modifiers are basically functions that can be applied to a 3d object to transform it in a certain way. They can be used separately, but when combined they become a very powerful tool. In this, they are much like filters in Photoshop.

Right now that library, which should be fully documented in the coming weeks, offers:

• a framework for creating static and animated modifier stacks

• 3 basic modifiers: Noise, Bend and Perlin

Check this project at google code and play with it until some other cool Sandy3D news be available

Hey, it’s time to spam the blog again! People ask when 3.0.3 will be out, so I thought I’d write a bit on subject as well as what’s going on in general.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out? Well, you might know that Thomas is currently on vacation and will not work on release for next two weeks, at least. Then, you also might know about some breaking changes he introduced for better performance, but currently performance seems to be even worse, and so this situation needs some investigation. People who want latest version compatible with 3.0.2 can use revision 663, but be aware that some bugs were fixed after that (not to mention pending bugs).

Still, things aren’t bad for 3.0.3, in my opinion. I make noise and contribute some new stuff (you might have noticed StarField or MD2, I guess). Other people in team keep quiet, but SVN commits notifications give them away If you suddenly notice some clever code or documentation improvements, you know they did it.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out, again? I think you can expect it in August as final version for v9 (unless someone suddenly finds lots of bugs a day after release).

To conclude this post, I’d like to take my chance and congratulate folks at Ginga who released online jets comparison application for Embraer company last week. A part of this great application - flight range flash widget - was designed using two open source libraries, APE and - you guessed it - Sandy.

Using globes for spatial data visualization is something we now see more and more; to address this trend, I just added new tutorial for Sandy users who would like to do something similar themselves. For other people, I plan to release some basic globe component for free, so keep an eye on this secret link.

We are pleased to accounce that Dan Allen, one member of the Sandy team, decided to release his excellent script FlashHelpBook to generate flash help book for your libraries.

Basically it adds an help book, syntax highlighting, and code hints to the Flash IDE for any existing library ( successfully tested libraries: Sandy, Away3D, Papervision, and Box2D)

This is an excellent tool that Dan release for Sandy for months now, and which helped quite a lot of developers to get the Sandy documentation directly in Flash, as the normal flash help (shortcut to go in correct documentation part is working too).

See this announcement of Sandy Forum to have full information and give feedbacks.

Go now, and use FlashHelpBook script to improve your workflow in Flash IDE developments !

Thanks Dan

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 :

• First WOW tutorial: Bounding Area and Sphere
• Learning how to use WOW Planes

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 :

• The global lightening system in the new Sandy 3.0.2  : Explains the new shading properties
• Phong attribute explanation with examples. Understand the new phong related properties and how to use them in order to fix some of the common issues.

Sandy Team.

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.