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The Away3D Team is happy to announce a powerful new feature: vector shape primitives. It allows the engine to represent complex vector graphics in 3D as a series of transformed linear and bezier instructions. The most immediate appliance of this is, of course, 100% sharp text despite the scale.

Usage is extremely simple: the engine will be able to dynamically parse True Type Font (ttf) files, so you can just point it to an external or embedded font file and Away3D will do the rest! Furthermore, a Scalable Vector Graphics (svg) parser should also be included in the package, clearing the way not only for 3D text, but for any kind of vector graphics such as logos and even art developed in Adobe Illustrator. These primitives will behave just as any other 3D object, and become particularly interesting when extrusions are applied to them.

The new feature produces some really impressive graphics, so dont hesitate to play around with it when it is out. Implementations are endless… Click on the image above to see it in action!

The Away3D also introduces Li from http://www.lidev.com.ar/ as the newest Away3D Team member with his great addition of Vector Shapes to the engine.

The first Away3d training sessions kick off in London on the 22nd and 23rd of October. These are intensive workshop days organised by the LFPUG, full details of which can be found here. a brief synopsis follows:

Essential Away3d Techniques

Two days of practical tips and tricks for producing Flash 3D content using the Away3d engine.

Learn how to maximise the potential of Away3D with the co-founder and chief architect Rob Bateman. Old and new features will be covered in detail, including the latest updates available in the recently announced 2.2 release. Topics range from generic 3d concepts to detailed walkthroughs of real-world techniques designed to aid 3D design and development in Flash. Full source code is provided for all explanatory demos.

This course is aimed at developers and code-oriented designers interested in using real-time 3D in their flash work with the Away3D engine. Minimum requirements: Introductory or Intermediate level knowledge of Actionscript 3.0 and Flex Builder/FDT/CS3.

The course still uses the smaller class sizes found to work well in previous training sessions, and at £200+VAT should be within everyone’s budget ;). To book a place, please contact training AT lfpug.com.

At the risk of starting something of a tradition, it’s time once again to take you for a little ride. RailAway Express is a ticket for a unique travel into the realm of Away3D 2.2 and it’s new runtime model generation and animation features. Its probably our last Flash 9 demo too.

Almost everything you see along your journey in this 780 kb all in demo is code generated.

A special thanks goes to Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert for their help on the sound dynamics.

Some of the new features in 2.2 include:

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.

Documentation will be updated within the next few days

So turn up your speakers and enjoy a wild ride into the realm of Away3D 2.2!

The Away3D Team.

More info on our group here…

Our member Jalava with his group decided to take part to the Assembly Summer 2008 Digital Computer Multimedia Festival and compete in the real wild competition, chasing for their hat trick furiously. They already had won the Browser Demo competition twice in 2006 and 2007, and now this year the browser demos were unified with the mobiles et al creating massive open gl es vs silverlight vs flash vs mobile phones vs handheld consoles face-off competition!

Evoflash won with clear margin with their hard work of 10 days production called 99er. (Oh, Silverlight entries were two last positions :P)

The demo uses Away 2.1 source base with few bugfixes and improvements, including DrawScaledBitmap fix to render particles properly with bitmap renderer without flicker) that will be in v2.2. The Away3D engine was used in most of the parts of demo together with Evoflash’s own custom effect synchronization & post processing engine to create one of most visually exploding flash ever seen!

Click the image to view the production:

We hope to get even more Away3d demos like this from you guys, challenge yourself!

Away3D Team

Away3D has the honor of being nominated as a FLASHFORWARD Film Festival 2008 Finalist!

Show your support by voting for us in the People’s Choice Award by clicking here:

http://www.flashforwardconference.com/peoples_choice

A huge round of applause for those of you who have made this possible!

The Away3D Team

The brand-new Hellboy movie site employs Away3D for some fancy cinematic effects in this wonderfully crafted website. The folks at Crew Creative did a great job with Away3D and Flash, and deserve a round of applause from the Away3D Team!

Check out the site at http://www.hellboymovie.com/

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 plans we have coming up for new features in version 2.2, and the development starting in the Flash 10 branch shouldn’t disappoint either!

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...