Away3D team showcases their product with few websites that use Away3D as it gains power, speed, and popularity. This is a realtime 3D engine for flash written in ActionScript 3, originally derived from Papervision3D. Away3D engine is designed to be fast and extensible.

Recently they have released the 1.9.3 version of this engine with the following features:

• merged PreciseBitmapMaterial with BitmapMaterial to allow all
  inherited materials access to the precision property (such as MovieMaterial)
• addition of TransformBitmapMaterial with properties enable the
  scaling, translation and rotation of a texture inside it’s render plane
  (handy for tiling textures), and Projecting a texture onto a mesh (allowing
  creation of shadows and more)
• addition of BitmapMaterialContainer, which allows a single Mesh to
  have multiple materials layered on it’s surface.
• faster Matrix3D, Number3D and Quarternion calculations

For people upgrading their code, it may be worth taking a closer look a the
last change in the list above, as it employs a different method of applying
transformations etc that will need to be applied to any of your own calls to
those functions. Essentially the changes are two-fold - all static calls
have been removed to aid speed, and multipication, cross products etc. do
not create any new instances - they act on the performing instance to save
on garbage collection.

Other modifications are listed below:

• optimisations to z-sorting and intersecting filters
• bugfix for inactive pitch/roll/yaw
• memory optimisations to engine
• removal of all static matrix3d calls
• removal of all static number3d calls
• removal of all static screenvertex calls
• removal of all static quaternion calls
• correction of moviematerial fillrect clearing
• removal of trash package
• temporary removal of extrusion package
• temporary removal of shapes package
• updated stats package to correctly count faces in objects
• updated quadranttree to maintain structure between frames
• creation of TransformBitmapMaterial
• MovieMaterial inherits precision property
• bitmapMaterial merged with PreciseBitmapMaterial
• stats menu hides built in items
• as usual, any problems people experience with the new revision should be
  reported on this list in order to be dealt with promptly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 1:07 am and is filed under ActionScript 3.0, Flash 3D. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.