Flash 3D Engines Anyone?

Yup been busy lately.. busy playing Starcraft 2 and other stuffs... (not a very good explanation of being busy...)

Now some of you have already seen and even played with 3D flash games. Ever wonder the 3D engines behind them? How it works? Who writes them? What were they thinking? What do you mean you have not watch Piranha 3D? Go watch it now! Well currently (at time of writing) Flash CS5 does support 3D but in a limited away that you need an engine to be on top of it to ease things out. It's like saying :

"Yeah C++ can do 3D with OpenGL and DirectX and stuff but then to get moving fast (fast and productive being the operative word here...), people probably work with an already built 3D engine like The Unreal Engine (Unreal), The Crystal Engine (Final Fantasy)..."

Well, in Flash we have 2 FREE 3D Engines to work with. (popular ones that is)

• Away3D (here)


• Papervision3D (here)

You can just download the libraries and plug it into Flash Develop like how you did it with Flixel in my previous tutorials.

Which one am I using? Well err... not any actually... just browsing along.. moving along but Away3D seems to be pretty easy to get into... no I am not promoting it. Just ignore my previous sentences.. well ignore this whole paragraph but you might want to take a look at a book called "The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash". It's easy to follow and though there are errors in the codes, it's easily spottable.. spotable? Is this a word? 'Spotable'? By the way, it's based on Away3D.



Note : if you are interested, there is this Piranha flick movie called "Mega Piranha" which is totally awesome in a comedic way.