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?

Thanks, Brian Hodge hodgedev.com

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 It seems to me that PV3D is faster, although this blog entry might be pretty outdated.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...

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/

Answer 3

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/

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that the irc channel for PV3D is fairly active and they've been able to answer any questions that I had due to an outdated tutorial or awkwardly documented section of code.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

Answer 5

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.

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

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

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).