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Cast 3D - Flash goes full circle

Flash started with 2D animation. Later came 2.5D (fake 3D) and now we have several 3D engines doing the real thing. Cast 3D is an animation framework that takes Flash back to the roots and combines 3D models with code to produce smooth, interactive animation.

Flash started out as an animation program, but lately the focus have been on applications, not animation. Cast 3D will maybe bring Flash a little more back to it's roots? "Cast3D is 3D animation framework library for Adobe Flash in ActionScript3. The foundation is a multi key-framed geometrical animation. Cast3D supports geometry and texture morphing, skin animation, 3D sound, animated movie and video. A number of animation interpolation splines is implemented to provide smooth and natural motion, like Bezier, TCB, Hemite(cubic), Cosine and Linear." This solid selection should provide all the possibilities you'd need.

The Cast 3D engine is not based around a single 3D engine, but ports for Sandy3D and Papervision3D are written, so you can actually choose what to use for rendering. Cast 3D has it's own format that is loosely based on the popular Collada format, but it also features an importer for 3DS MAX (.3ds) files. The syntax looks pretty straighforward as well, so if you're not all that technical, this could be an easier entry than programming Sandy or Papervision directly. The Demo page only features a couple demos, but they're both nice and shows some possibilities. The engine is still quite young, but if you have some experience with 3D animation, you may be the one they are looking for to expand this section.

3D in Flash is really moving along nicely these days. Papervision will soon get support for loading Object-files (.obj) as well thanks to Flash developer Knut Urdalen. Here's a demo of a 10K triangle mesh of a fish loaded straight from the .obj file and playing back at a good framerate. Knut showed this at the last meeting of Flash User Group Norway (FUGN). The group behind Away 3D have also showed some impressive demos lately. Here's an interactive 3D walkthrough of a temple as well as post-processed turtles that were posted last week. Very impressive stuff and remember - this is all using Flash 9, a player that now has more than 90% distribution. Flash 10 will be even more powerful with low-level bitmap processing and some forms of 3D support. It's exciting times ahead...

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (March 08th 2008)