I was recently invited to write an article relating to Away3D for The FWA. Wanting to do something a bit different from the usual parading of sites and demos, I decided instead to try and write a bit about what running an open source project is like, and what you need to watch out for. The result was given the following rather long title: A survival guide to building a successful open source project, and was published on The FWA earlier this week. The article ended up sounding a little dark, so should probably be accompanied by the caveat that I do quite enjoy writing open source software! I must have been in a bad mood that day…

Thanx go out to Rob and the team - flying the flag for cool sites and their creators

Away3D has a new double-release in the now familiar 2.X / 3.X format for Flash Player 9 and 10 branches of the main engine.

The biggest new addition is the fantastic work done by both Fabrice and David to get BSP sorting working in a usable form. For those of you scratching your heads over what BSP sorting is, take a quick look at this excellent explanation of the principles from David, who has been the main coding force behind the feature.

Implementing BSP sorting is only half the issue - the other half is getting your model into a format that is readable by a BSP renderer. For this, Fabrice has upgraded his extremely useful pre-processing  tool Prefab3D - the new 1.3 version includes an option to export any model in a format that can be processed by the BSP algorithms in the Away3D library.

The practical upshot of all this is that Away3D now has the capacity for creating large FPS-style games that allow many different rooms in a scene, while suffering no loss of render speed. A case in point being the David-Fab collaboration for the recent FITC keynote in Amsterdam, the Hacienda Experiment:

A number of rooms can be navigated using the mouse and keyboard, with collision detection enabled by processing the BSP format in Away3D. The beautifully shaded textures were created using Prefab3D’s texture baking feature.

Be careful where you tread, as this is still an experimental demo! Further optimizing work is being carried out on collision and rendering loops in Away3D, but even at this stage, the speed benefits are evident.

You can grab the Away3D update either from the svn repository or the downloads page of away3d.com, where you will also find a bunch of updated examples. As usual, please direct any bug reports to the googlecode issues list, and any questions about functionality to the Away3D mailing list.

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d 2.4 & 3.4 update has been recently released on the Away3d.com site, with a completely revamped examples section, for both Flash 9 & Flash 10 versions. To grab your copy, head over to the svn or go straight to the downloads section of Away3d.com for a zip download of sources and examples.

many new features have been added to this release, including:

• Vector graphics and fonts support.
• Typed-checked loader support.
• Geometry modifiers for exploding, welding, mirroring…
• Depth material for creating depth masks.
• Normalmap and Bumpmap generators from geometry.
• Light pre-baking on textures.

plus the usual stability improvements and a ton of bugfixes. Documentation will soon be updated at away3d.com/livedocs

Special thanx must go to Guojian Wu of wu-media.com for his excellent new as3 library swfvector, which allows you to convert any shape outline or textfield in a swf into as3 data. This is used to great effect in the new release, easily enabling the drawing of textfields and shapes in 3d

The examples interspersing this post can be accessed by clicking on their images - each comes with it’s own source which can be downloaded by selecting “View Source” in the right-click menu. Or you can download these and other examples (both .as files and .fla files) by going to away3d.com/downloads. The Basic_Swf example also uses the excellent as3dmod library (which you can download from here) for producing the bend effect. Now you can twist and deform vector graphics in 3d, thanx to as3dmod, swfvector and Away3d 2.4 /3.4

Enjoy the new release!

Away3d’s flash10 branch has recently been updated to the 3.3 version - a parallel release that now runs alongside the 2.3 version for Flash 9. Initially a compatibility release, the flash10 branch is now being used as the place where Flash 10 optimisations are made to the engine.

One such optimisation is in the area of shading, where Pixel Bender filters allow far greater render speeds than standard Flash filters. The demo above is an illustration of the kind of power now available with the latest update - normalmapping becomes a good deal faster and smoother than before, thanks to per-pixel normalising and the abandonment of layering which was previously the only way to achieve a shaded effect.

Special thanx go to Eddie Carbin for supplying the model, and David Lenaerts for the HDR filter that creates an extra ‘blooming’ layer to the view for an accentuation of highlights and shadows in the shading. Source for the demo can be accessed via the usual right-click in the movie, or directly from here. Don’t forget that to compile this demo you will require the 3.3 version of Away3d, downloadable from http://www.away3d.com/downloads or from the flash10 branch in the svn.

The 2.3 update of Away3d has been released! This new version comes in two flavours, a legacy Flash 9 version for all people wishing to carry on using Away3d in their current projects, and a new Flash 10 version for those lucky enough to be already developing in cs4 and Flash 10.

Added features in the version are many and varied! Some highlights include:

• Frustum and nearfield clipping
• Object culling (using frustum calculations)
• Camera lenses
• Advanced normalmap tools
• Bezierpatch tool for creating smooth surfaces
• Improved memory management
• Improved extrusion tools
• Billboard mesh objects

The Frustum room demo shows the new frustum clipping class in action. The 3d room can be navigated with no clipping artifacts that are usually a common problem with interior scenes such as this. The frustum technique involves slicing triangles to the viewing window rather than removing them.

Use the mouse and cursor keys to navigate, and the keyboard shortcuts listed in the demo to see various different render options for a comparison between old and new.

As always, the source for the demo is available here, or by right-clicking in the demo window.

Frustum culling is only one of the new features on offer - for more information on others, head over to away3d.com!