Tutorials by the Away3D community

Title: Creating 3D games and apps with Away3D 4 and Stage 3D – Part 1

by Richard Olsson
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 4.x Flash Builder View, Scene and Camera

With the release of Flash Player 11, which includes the hardware accelerated Stage3D API, the number of 3D games, applications and online 3D experiences is likely to increase dramatically over the coming years. The Stage3D API is very powerful, but it comes with a fairly steep learning curve. Fortunately, there are frameworks you can use to simplify 3D development in Flash—such as the very popular open source 3D engine Away3D.

Title: Primitives (Part 3)

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x Primitives

This is the third and final tutorial on the Away3D primitives. This last batch features the more exotic ones, the ones you’ll probably not use that often. The GridPlane and LineSegment are great debugging tools, whereas the Cone, Torus and SeaTurtle are more on the “nice to have” list.

Title: Primitives (Part 2)

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x Primitives

In this tutorial, we keep exploring the simple but very useful primitives available in Away3D. As in the former tutorial, we also have some code that shows you how to use them beyond the basics. Now you’ll learn how to build simple panorama viewers by combining the Sphere and Skybox primitives with a hovering camera and we’ll also take a look at a cross platform software that can help you create the panoramas.

Title: Primitives (Part 1)

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x Primitives

Primitives are the building block of most 3D software. Away3D comes with 17 primitives as well as some helpers. This first tutorial on the primitives will explain how to work with primitives to achieve some great looking effects such as building a sound visualizer, a CMYK color separation viewer and more. This tutorial will also introduce you to the two coding styles that Away3D supports.

Title: Create the Earth and the Heavens in Less Than an Hour

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x Flash View, Scene and Camera Interactivity Setup Textures

3D is one of the many cool things made possible with Flash Player 9 and the super fast Virtual Machine. This tutorial will show you how to create a realistic looking interactive earth, complete with a sun and a starlit sky. Scared? Don’t be - it’s easy with Away3D!

Title: Manipulating 3D Objects

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x 3D-Theory / Math

Just as any two dimensional object in Flash, your 3D objects can be positioned, rotated, scaled, grouped and more. This tutorial will teach you how to work in 3D space and tween your objects using your favorite tweening package.

Title: Installing Away3D for Flash, Flex or FlashDevelop

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x Flash Flash Builder Flash Develop Setup

So you’ve decided to get started with 3D in Flash for the first time and don’t know how to get started? This tutorial will help you set up Away3D for either Flash, Flex or Flashdevelop.

Title: A Simple Away3D Class Explained

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x AS3

This tutorial is the first in a series about Away3D, a powerful real-time 3D engine for Flash or Flex. This tutorial explains a very simple Away3D class line by line so that those that still use Actionscript 2 or have a designer background will be able to understand what is going on in the rest of the tutorials.

Title: The View and the Scene

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x View, Scene and Camera

When you look out through a window in your house, you only see what is visible from your point of view, not what is occluded by the walls. The viewable area is decided by the size and shape of the window, so you’ll see a “cropped” view of what’s outside. This is exactly how the View works in Away3D as well. It is the “window” that we view our 3D world through.

Title: How to Use the Camera(s)

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x View, Scene and Camera

The camera is what you view the 3D world through. Just as a real camera, the virtual 3D camera applies perspective to your models by adjusting properties such as zoom, focus and position. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use the 3 cameras available in Away3D.

Title: Flash 3D Basics

by Jens Chr Brynildsen
Tutorial Beginner Away3D 3.x View, Scene and Camera Primitives Materials Lighting 3D Models

This article is for those new to 3D computer graphics. It will introduce you to the lingo used and will explain what is required to make 3D in Flash. If you don’t know what a mesh, texture or shader is, this tutorial will prepare you for working with Flash 3D engines such as Papervision3D, Away3D and Sandy. This tutorial does not require programming knowledge as it only covers the basics of 3D on computers in general.