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

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.

I’m very happy to announce the release of Extralight package from Cedric Jules for Sandy.

ExtraLight offers a texture based lightening, which is by definition a bit heavier in file size but also much more CPU friendly.  Get all the information from its dedicated webpage clicking on the banner above.

Cedric offers a new demo to celebrate this release, very impressive as always!

Good job Cedric

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

After a very nice 3 weeks testing period since the Release Candidate release, we are proud to announce the final release of Sandy 3.0 engine.

From the release candidate the engine has become even more robust, some cool features has been added and new demos, tutorials are available.

We also have seen some amazing experiments such as 3D physics here and here , multiplayer 3D with Red5 right here, and two people have become some great contributors.

Sandy is now offering a perfect toolkit for beginners, and a complete set of advanced tutorials and FAQ notes, for more advanced users.

Sandy project is becoming a more and more collaborative project.We have had many code contributions since the release candidate and a new project sections has been added to the website in addition to the resources page.

Do not hesitate to take part of it ! Sandy 3.0 API has been designed to be as flexible as possible, especially to simplify user contributions.

For example, the material attributes architecture allows to connect any kind of attributes (for example, dashed lines to replace wireframe, phong shading etc..) to the existing materials.

It is up to you to share them with the comunity after that!Sandy project has also a very active forum : 1218 posts and 190 topics has been written since the RC0.

About the new features :

1. Flat shading attributes for color and bitmap materials.
2. Introduction of perspective corrected mapping for BitmapMaterial (based on Away3d.com code).
3. New Skybox primitive
4. More freedom about clipping settings, you can now specify, no clipping, front plane clipping or full frustum clipping depending on your needs.
5. Scene viewport rectangular clipping.
6. And a lot of bug fixes and minor additions …

Now it is time to go to the Download page after visiting our new demos !

Happy 3D!

We are very pleased to announce the first official AS3 version of Sandy engine.
Even in a RC0 status, the version is fairly stable and its power/flexibility has reached a new level.

Go to the download page and grab it.

Here a list of main features:
- Simple and more powerful API
- Frustum culling and Frustum clipping
- compatible with majority of tween libraries (Tweener, etc. )
- real scene graph representation, with a fully integration of the camera as an element of this scene tree.
- flexible objects mapping. Each material has some attributes that allow it display more information (edges, outine, light)
- Parsers able to load more that 1 single object. (ASE, 3DS-basic-, COLLADA formats)
- possibility to choose the depth sorting between Object and Polygon level.
- built-in bubbling event system
- Sprite2D and Sprite3D (understand oriented sprite) integration.

More features to come (as cooler materials), but for now, have fun with the AMV2 power and what we hope to be a really good 3D engine. Really looking forward to see what you guys can do with it!

To have an idea of the capabilities, give a look at the demos page.

Have lot of fun, and yeah, thanks Adobe for that amazing new player.