Away3D 2.0 released

With a great looking example scene called "The green planet", the Away3D team just announced that the new version of this 3D engine is ready for download. Some of the new features include simulated phong shading with specular highlights, z-depth filter, new materials and much more.

The Green Planet demo looks stunning and plays back at stellar speeds even as fullscreen on a 30" MacPro. Note: we had some issues getting the demo to work in the Debug version of the Flash Player, so make sure you use the ordinary version to play the demo. (demo now works flawlessly) Rob Bateman has also posted an updated version of the bust-demo showcased earlier, but now with support for all four shading types.

Here's a list of new features in this release:

• 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

Click here for full details at the Away3D mailing list. You can download the update from the trunk in the svn repository:

http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

or go to the downloads section of away3d.com where a new zip file is
available:

http://www.away3d.com/downloads

PS: make sure you find all three powerpacks to see the spaceship take off.

PS2: you can do something to the dragonfly as well!

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (April 15th 2008)

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