As more and more people discover the potential of 3d in Flash, the versatility of the Away3D framework is beginning to show. Agencies and individuals alike are using it as their engine of choice, and producing some very cool content as illustrated by the following selection of projects!

Discovery Channel uses Away3D on a Flash Video Game “Solar Symphony”, where you interact with the Planets and sounds.

Away3D can be seen in use on the Square Enix (of Final Fantasy fame) members website. Now you can choose your avatar when you login in, and modify it realtime in 3D.

The Strangers Movie site uses a good dose of Away3D and video materials. Try the experience, it’s pretty spooky!

Cadbury’s “A Glass and a Half Full” website uses Away3D and 3D video renderings to drop you into a surreal world. A great concept for a 3D website, and the experience is pretty realistic!

As well as this, you can do some cool Truck modding in the Tricked Out Trucks section.

While we are on the subject of trucks, check out the revamped Brahmamobile.
A fantastic Away3D upgrade!

We’d like to thank Flashkit for the mention last month of the new Away3D 2.0 release on their homepage, and flashmagazine for running a great tutorial on their site for getting started with Away3D code. And of course, all of the people involved in the projects above for creating such cool showcase material!

The Away3D Team

JSAway is a spin-off of Away3D which provides web developers access to the high performance graphics capabilities of the engine, through JavaScript. Currently based of V2.0, JSAway exposes implementations of the API and provides other supporting functionality to allow complex scenes to be created and animated providing full interaction between the web page and the 3D scene.

JSAway is still in early development but from the examples, you can easily see it’s potential in opening up 3D on the web to different community. All the examples use the same single SWF file, while the underlying web page’s JavaScript code controls what is going on.

Some of the features of JSAway.

• JavaScript only - no ActionScript knowledge required.
• simple command reference exposes huge range of features
• all API basic primitives can be used
• basic 3D event handling
• filter based effects on objects
• simple custom tweening operations
• simple bitmap manipulation, get/set pixel and draw bitmap
• getting/setting of object properties
• material handling
• content (materials and 3D models) loading - bitmaps, sketchup, dae…..
• powerful features including lathe, extrudes, elevations, etc are supported
• custom tweening of object properties
• various automatic camera functions - object tracking, panning, etc
• simple mouse navigation controls - rotation and twisting the scene based on mouse movement

For further details and to check out the examples :-

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/examples/index.html - The examples

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/index.html - Full details and downloads

http://away3d.com/jsaway - JSAway details on Away3D

We hope you find it useful.

The Away3d Team

Away3d 2.1 bring some welcome assistance to getting starting with the engine - a revamped documentation section (now included in the svn) and a brand new demos download containing code examples which will continue to be updated as more are written.

As well as this, there are some updates to the engine that should help with general use, including:

• Simplified events model - listeners can be added using the supplied methods or with the standard addEventListener method of the EventDispatcher.
• Event types listed as static classes.
• Simplified BitmapRenderSession use.
• Object primitives have dynamic property setters that can be adjusted after instantiation.
• Merged AlphaBitmapMaterial class (all bitmapmaterials now support alpha and color properties).
• Dot3 and Enviro materials take the bitmap for shading maps as a required argument.
• Improved material access on individual sides of the cube primitive

plus the usual bug fixes and housekeeping updates.

As usual there is a new tag in the googlecode svn, and a new download zip in the downloads section.

Something else that is probably worth drawing attention to is the issues section of the googlecode repository. Our mailing list has been very successful at being used for bug reports in the past, but to prevent any future reports from being accidentally overlooked, we would urge everyone to start logging their bugs in this list.

Also, for those wanting to find a few more tutorials for Away3d, be sure to have a look at the External Site section of the tutorials page.

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d Team

AWAY3D 2.0 IS HERE!

Our new release may bring out the explorer in you, with features allowing a lot more expansive 3d possibilities. Here we present an atmospheric oddessey taking the reliable formula of a crash-landed spaceship and an alien world… Green Planet.

Now you can realize your 3D world like never before in Flash.

Some of the new features in 2.0 include:

• Simulated phong shading (with blinn-phong specular highlights)
• Environment-mapped materials
• Normal-mapped materials (an open source first for Flash)
• Z-depth filter for large outdoor scenes
• Fog filter
• Straight-to-bitmap rendering for fast scaled views
• Surface caching for fast rendered lights
• Package refactor for easier learning of basic classes

Full update details have been posted on the AWAY3D mailing list. You can get the source files by accessing our svn repository or going to our downloads page

Handling the rendering of over 13000 polygons, 16 animated and interactive models with surface tracking, and a cool soundtrack composed by Atom(bang), this is a demo unlike anything else… so turn up your speakers and enjoy a new kind of ride into the realm of Away3D 2.0!

The Away3D Team.

More info on our group here…

We’ve now completed the main part of the refactoring work on rendering pipeline for upcoming Away3d 1.9.5. Now user has possiblity to render either to a sprite (SpriteView3D) or select the BitmapView3D which renders to a Bitmap. This can then be used as a normal DisplayObject or you can request a direct access to the rendered output for post processing etc.

Jalava, our new team member, quickly whipped together some post processing effects from using evoengine from Evoflash and slapped it together with Away3d.

Here is the result.Bitmap Rendering Demo

As you can see, it is pretty easy to add different post processing effects on the away3d engine when you can get everything rendered to a bitmap.

In here we are doing about 20 fullscreen bitmapData#draw calls to render postprocessing plus we are rendering about 1200 polygons fully textured with precision bitmap material.

the Away3d Team

Away3D has recently seen a sudden increase in commercial use - now including areas such as Education, Gaming, and Online Applications. The following content shows a sample of what’s currently being powered by the Away3d Engine.

EffectiveUI launchs an application for the Discovery Channel called “Discovery Earth Live” which lets you visualize different scientific data on an interactive 3D globe, as well as read about news stories around the world; the data is both images and video, and you can adjust layering and opacities of different layers in real-time as the globe spins.
In otherwords: Really Awesome.
http://www.discovery.com/discoveryearthlive

Newgrounds features 3D Sugar Glider on the front page and 3D Flash Games finally become a reality on the Web.
Newgrounds is the largest and most popular Flash site on the web, and the future of Web Entertainment. Now Away3D is pushing the3D Flash Game envelope.

Play 3D Sugar Glider !

Fusebox launches Empressr, the first web-based application that lets you create, share and store presentations online.

It uses Away3D for the 3D transitions, with many more features being made.
It’s nominated for a Webware 100 award for the Best Web 2.0 sites.
www.empressor.com

Away3D has many new things coming up, please JOIN THE AWAY3D GROUP to stay updated.

If your looking for somewhere to relax (and I know we are!) after a hard day coding with Away3d, then why not try the latest online virtual-zen environment: The Away3d Temple

The beautiful ambient music is composed by Atom(bang)

This demo weights only 204 kb with fully code generated meshes, and combines Flash’s power to reuse, alter, and mix sources with the latest Away3d tools.

We are busy building tutorials and the source of this demo will be available soon across a series of posts in a new section of the away3d site.

Many of the new features in the latest Away3d version are present in this demo, which is part of the reason it will be used as an extended tutorial. A full feature update will be announced on our mailing list, but the highlight additions include:

• new AnimatedBitmapMaterial for processor-saving animations
• new extrusions classes for creating many different shapes on the fly
• new BitmapFileMaterial for automatic loading of a material
• added autoloading textures functionality in collada and 3ds importers
• new extended 3ds importer
• added 2d rotation on Sprite2d and Sprite2DDir
• new importer for google sketchup (kmz) files
• improved md2 importer
• added md2 animated to as3 exporter

The 1.9.4 source has been tagged and can be downloaded from the svn repository, or as a zip file from the Away3d downloads section.

If you would like to follow the progress of future Away3d updates, please feel free to join our mailing list

Hope you enjoy!

the Away3d Team

The Away3d Team are pleased to announce a new partnership with the community-driven software company Strata, involving their 3d application software Live 3D and 3d[in] Photoshop plugin.

Live 3D is a powerful 3d exporter for the web, which provides an intuative workflow for converting content made in standard desktop 3d modeling software to web based 3d content in Java, PDF and Flash formats.

3d[in] is a plugin extension for Photoshop that allows the import, manipulation and export of 3d content to a variety of web formats.

Away3d will be providing an updated Flash export option for 3d content that displays in realtime, with navigation and animation options built in. The new export format will provide designers with an easy one-click solution for publishing 3d content, using the Flash Player to maintain a high level of compatibility with web browsers.

The Away3d Team will also be developing further tools to allow content manipulation for 3d exported to Flash from the Strata product line.

We are all really excited about the potential this offers 3d on the web, as currently the transition from high-end accelerated desktop 3d content to lower end, browser based web content is still somewhat tricky for 3d designers. Our partnership with Strata aims to address the balance by improving the workflow for Flash content.

Further details will be announced as work progresses.

Here are a few Websites that use Away3D as it gains power, speed, and popularity.
Congratulations to everyone that made this possible.

B-Reel launchs the new Flash/Away3D site for the EA Games title FIFA Street 3.
www.fifastreet3.com

North Kingdom releases a site for Toyota Europe with a game that use the Away3D engine.

www.buildyouriq.com

TODESIGN completed their newest Internet interior arrangement application called Dekort3D.

Create any room and change walls colours, floor materials, furniture. It features object rotation, collision detection, snap to object, and save to local disk.
dekort3d.todesign.pl

Honey Agency creates a Flash/Away3D Interactive map of the local New York City area.
www.450park.com/map.php?startNode=1000

Away3D version 1.9.3 is now available via the svn or downloads section of away3d.com. The above demo shows some of the new capabilites of the BitmapMaterialContainer class, along with a viewable source (right-click on the background of the swf) that can be used with the 1.9.3 codebase.

The extrusion classes being worked on in the demos below are to be included in the forthcoming 1.9.4 release version