The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash is all about using the Away3D engine. Written by Rob Bateman, one of the co-founders of Away3D, and Richard Olsson. Away3D is an open source project that is actively maintained and has plenty of community support.
I have only dabbled in true 3D up until recently so I did some research and experimenting and then chose Away3D to dive into. While there are many tutorials out there I found myself wondering what I was missing because I didn’t have a good sense of the full breath of what was possible with Away3D. Fortunately I found this book which covers Away3D from beginning to end. If you are likewise getting into Away3D then I would highly recommend grabbing this book.
Here are a few demos and show reals that explore what Away3D is capable of:
- Away3D: Adobe’s new 3D API “Molehill”
- Away3D 3.6.0: Flash 10 upgrades and the Influxis Battlecell API
- Away3D: showcase video for 2010
Book content and code examples
The book covers all of the core features of Away3D in very short code examples. I didn’t keep track of the time that I spent reading the book but I would estimate that it took less that 12 hours to read the entire book and work the majority of the examples. I didn’t follow the code examples precisely because they were written in pure Actionscript while I was working within a Flex project. It was easy enough to skim their example and then create something similar from scratch that suited my personal coding conventions.
To speed things along I created a template that contained the basic setup needed for an Away3D project. After you work a few examples you’ll see the common code and be able to create your own.
Most of their examples work without any issues – mostly. Occasionally I would run into issues where the book differed from the most recent build of Away3D. Usually I would be able to figure out how to proceed while a few times I had to Google for a solution. That’s not an entirely bad thing. Finding workarounds often leads to learning new things that we wouldn’t otherwise encounter.
I downloaded the PDF version of the book instead of getting the printed version. I found that to work very well for me because it isn’t like I’m ever going to read this book when I’m not sitting at my PC. Plus it’s easy to keep around as a reference on my laptop when I’m traveling. ( Egon was right, print is dead. )
History of Away3D ( from the book )
Away3D began its life as a branch of the Papervision3D engine in 2007 but quickly began evolving in a direction intended for stability and ease of use. While Papervision3D had set the benchmark in terms of interactive potential, it was lacking what every other format requires in order to promote longevity—a standardized approach to content that promotes learning and aids future development. Over the ensuing months and years, Away3D provided one of the most consistent upgrade paths of any 3D engine for Flash, with its open source license allowing anyone to contribute a bug fix or feature enhancement.
Away3D seems to be the current center of attention in terms of 3D Flash, but I wonder if the release of Molehill will change that. Will we see a resurgence of interest in 3D Flash and the emergence of competing platforms? Also, there are some cool projects being created using WebGL.
@Aiko Away3D has a version in development – 4.0 – rebuilt specifically for Molehill.