Matt Shooks

I started reading The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash this week and have liked it so far.  From all that I can tell, it looks like Papervision 3D is a dead project with the loss of one of the main developers. It looks like Away3d is next in line and this book covers development using Away3d version 3. So far I have only run into a couple of problems as the examples appear to use an earlier version of Away3d than the current release version of 3.6. Flash now has it's own vector data type so you no longer use the Away3d vector data type. I have also noticed several of the Away3d classes that had 3D in the name have had that portion removed. With support for Molehill in Away3d 4, it will be an interesting option to include in our future game and simulation training at work.

I have to say I am very interested in Papervision 3D. There is quite a bit of buzz around the launch of the Papervision 3D public beta, Papervision component for Flash CS3 and a Papervision 3D cheat sheet. In the past at work, we have simulated 3D environments in our Flash based training using Swift3D, Poser and occasionally 3D Studio Max. To be able to create actual 3D environments for our training may speed up our development process as there is a lot of design and coding work involved to take a 3D model into 2D.