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.

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:

SearchCube was originally a personnal project created by one member of Sandy’s forum to get more familiar with Sandy engine.

Today this project is supported by symmetri who propose to access this first 3D visual search engine for testing (BETA version).

Now let symmetri present this very interessting project :

searchcube searches the World Wide Web for websites, videos and images and displays previews of each result on a unique, three-dimensional cube interface. Developed in Flash Actionscript 3 using Sandy 3D Engine and Tweener open source libraries.

Read the rest of this entry »

UltrakillZ is an online multiplayer FPS ((first person shooter)  game  using Flash technology.

Technically speaking, UltrakillZ developped an homemade 3D engine using the Sandy DistortImage class for linear texture mapping. They also use their own server to handle the multiplayer part of the game.

If Ultrakillz is still in a closed BETA status, I’m able to say that it is currently a very nice game and the immerssion is really present. Even if not at the top of the current Flash 3D technics, their goal was to make a real game, efficient with a lot of sensations, and they did it perfectly! A real sucess!

Visit http://www.ultrakillz.com/ for more information

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!