What is the best Actionscript3 3D Engine?

Question

I am looking for a somewhat detailed explanation of which 3D Engine for Actionscript3 is the most efficient, practical, scalable, documented, community supported, etc. When I first got interested in the 3D world for flash and actionscript3, all I knew of was papervision3D. In my curious way I went to read up on papervision3D and was shocked at the lack of tutorials. Later I started to research Away3D and have found that their site is easy to traverse and there are many tutorials and easy to find documentation.

Is there something I am missing? Is papervision3D so good that it doesn't need tutorials and other mediums to help users adopt it and begin using it more often? Does it have a performance increase that allows this? Which 3D engine do you suggest?

Baxley

Answer 1

AFAIK, Away3D is a fork of Papervision3D. You might be interested in this comparison of their features. It seems to me that PV3D is faster, although this blog entry might be pretty outdated.

What I would like to know is which library will be the first to support the 3D related features of Flash 10. That would mean so much in performance...

Kernite

I really had no idea that away3d was a fork of papervision, after you told me this I decided to try Papervision3d again and its brilliant. Thanks alot for this clarification. The good people at Papervision3D really need to get a nice site out there with easy to find tutorials. – Baxley

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm still struggling to figure out what exactly viewport layers are, and what they are good for. Haven't found any good tutorial on that, yet, only a handful of examples of very limitied uses. – Kernite

It was a "fork", but these days it's the other way around. Papervision merged many features of Away into it's codebase for Papervision 2 (blog.papervision3d.org/2007/05/16/…). Check out this thread. One of the Away guys "talks a bit of trash" (in a respectful way of course). I think both groups acknoledge the work that the others are doing, and both seem to state that they are taking the codebases in different directions. They are both great. – Wondawonder

Answer 2

I came up against this same issue a few months back. In the end, I went with Sandy3d. What did it for me is the amount of quality documentation and the really supportive community which really helped me get my project up and running.

http://www.flashsandy.org/blog/

Suggs

Answer 3

I'd go with Away3D, if only because we know they are working so closely with Adobe to make sure that people's existing knowledge of their product translates as easily as possible to the upcoming Molehill version. If you're not already aware of it, Flash Player 11 is going to have an API for using OpenGL and/or DirectX 3D from within Flash. For those wishing to do 3D games and UI in Flash, this is going to be HUGE.

Porte

Answer 4

Papervision3D is going through the process of a full re-write to take advantage of CS4's new 3D capabilities. It sounds like they're also looking into mixing Alchemy into the engine to get a really big boost. You can check it out in a bit more detail here.

I've found that the irc channel for PV3D is fairly active and they've been able to answer any questions that I had due to an outdated tutorial or awkwardly documented section of code.

I don't have the reputation comment yet, so in response to David Hanak's comment above about viewport layers, the best use for them (that I've found) is to help with depth sorting. You can assign objects to a viewport layer and give that layer an index. Then tell the render to sort the viewport layers by index. It really helps reduce visual display errors.

Spurrier

Answer 5

The thing is, that papervision has a good community. In long term usage, you should take that into account.

I was the same in the beginning. It was not obvious where to find what. But you should stick with it. I just worked on a prototype: Papervision3d + Jiglib (3d physics for flash, ported from c++) and SmartFox Server = fun mulitplayer game :D

Anyway: this might help: http://papervision2.com/tutorial-list/

Jillayne

Answer 6

the BEST one really is Alternativa3D, but you have to pay them for it. It's the only one that currently supports FP10 features, as we're still waiting on PapervisionX

Bahena

Answer 7

Personally, I much prefer Away; although it started off life as a Papervision fork, they've diverged a long way since then. Most times I start a new 3D project, I begin by evaluating both (the time elapsed between projects often gives both engines time to go through some pretty major changes), and I always end up coming back to Away - to my eye, the rendering quality is a bit better, and it seems to be easier to Just Get Stuff Done with Away. I've never used Sandy, so I can't speak for that.

I've never had a problem getting support from the Away community - while PV's may be bigger, Away's certainly isn't short of helpful people.

In my experience, PV tends to accumulate whizzy features more quickly - it's probably the more bleeding-edge and technically impressive engine - but Away tends to be more stable, has a nicer API and is easier to hack about with ;)

This is all very much my own opinion, YMMV. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. The best recommendation I can make is to evaluate both and see which works best for you.

Carrero

Answer 8

I've used Papervision, Away3D, Alternativa and Sandy 3D (you can find tutorials for each here). I personally like Away3D better - it is free and has more features, as well as a Lite version if you just want the basics. I'm especially looking forward to the Haxe version, which might just let you compile stand alone executables in C++ with hxcpp.

Crossman

Answer 9

Options for 3D in Flash boil down to Papervision3d, Away3D or Sandy 3d Engine. I find the first two to be the best, in terms of maturity, documentation and performance.

In case you're interested, on the blog of my company there is a series of posts comparing those 3D engines for Flash (in Spanish, although you can follow the examples and read the source code in English).

Logia

Answer 10

Away3D is the current free champ.

It is in active development, and supports Flash Player 11, Stage3D, etc.

I would also start looking at Blender3D for a game engine in the near future. It's not Flash, but is free, and fairly easy to program. The langage behind it is Python.

Kurgan