Before Sandy, a lot of 3D engine were available. Most of them where “opensource” since you can dowload source files freely.
But even if they were really impressive and well coded, they are not really complete and documented, and worst, seems to be forgotten. Here I make the list of all the other engines available to download I know. Some of them can be interessting for you if you prefer to code in AS1 and/or for player6 or if you don’t like Sandy

• 9elements quaternions use for rotation, Cinema4D importer (great!), mesh deformation (nice too) and light.

• Illogicz AS1 component based engine. Camera movements with tweens, 2 primitives (cube and sphere), well optimized and with a quite good API.

• flashworx V4 Matrix use, XML format used to import complex objects (from ASE files?), backface culling, Z-sorting. Never tried it, but seems nice.

• 3DFS The most complete 3D engine of the list. AS2 and class based engine, with 3DS (.ASE files) files importer via an XML format, complex light effects, clipping (at least a basic one), camera rotation, user defined object mouse events, really accurate Z-sorting (even if I don’t like it) with S-buffer use. A really nice engine, but without documentation or tutorials. More as far as I know it’s not possible to create a scene without an XML file :s

• Informatika-nova Flash 3D engine The first real open source flash 3D engien, available at sourceforge. I’ve discussed with the author at the beginning, but as he wanted to give a specific way to his engine I did not follow him to follow mine. But this engine seems to be smart but not easy to use. And again, documentation and tutorials don’t exist. It’s a shame in my opinion.

• FlashEd Very popular engine with a very innovative game example. Wants to be game and interactive space oriented, with collision detection and multiple cameras. To be honnest I almost never tried it. I looked at the source code, and did not understand it (but its not a rare thing ). I don’t like the API, and as there are not examples and documentation (again!) I’ve stopped my tests rapidly.

• Simple3D A simple 3d engine from Andre Michelle. Useful to learn the basic math things.

• W3D A flash8 engione from Andre Michelle. ASE file loading (directly in AS, so without php, good point!), texturing, complex rendering effects and well optimized code (as almays with Andre). The API is nice and easy to learn in my opinion. The thing is that the code is not documented, just a simple example, and it’s a demo oriented engine ! No camera movement, just rotation effect is implemented, bad Z-sorting etc. But excellent to learn of to make an object rotating

I wanted to talk about eF3D, but the link I have is broken.

I hope this list can be useful for you, but I really hope Sandy becomes the best of them

Happy new year everyone !