Flash 3D Has a Long Way to Go
18 06 2008By Christian Laforte
Fast, out-of-the-box 3D on the web remains an elusive dream.
Theatre Magique has an informative review of the most active 3D flash libraries (e.g. Papervision). He notes that while the applications are promising, the performance is still lacking, and that the much publicized 3D capability in Flash 10 (the next version currently in Beta) doesn’t really help.
“In the end, Flash is still not ready for 3D. The Z dimension is now affordable thanks to the devoted work of some flashers but their engines are built on a weak platform, that is the Flash Player. It still cannot handle bitmap processing quickly, which is the biggest barrier to 3D. [...] Is Adobe waiting for some miracles from the community to move on to 3D ? Flash Player 10 is a beginning to this but it doesn’t even include Z-sorting so you end up doing it manually…You end up taking Away3D and waiting for the Flash Player 11 patiently.”
Still, I can’t leave you on a sad note, so here’s an effective see this Flash-based Fifa promotion by Electronic Arts. Note the 2D characters drawn on billboards, still cool nonetheless.
Disclosure: Adobe is one of our clients, but we have nothing to do with 3D in Flash. (We contributed the COLLADA translator for the 3D capability in Photoshop.)
So what can you do if you need fast 3D on the web, right now? There are many plug-ins that can help. One of them, our Feeling Engine, is amongst the fastest, most powerful and programmer-friendly. It’s fast because it takes maximum advantage of your graphic card and it’s written in C++, instead of slower languages like ActionScript or Java. Because it is the official COLLADA viewer, it has the most complete support for animated 3D models from Maya, 3ds Max and most other professional tools. And it can easily be extended through C++ and Javascript, so web developers don’t have to become 3D experts to use 3D in their web site.
Finally, we support both fast server-side and client-side use, which means that many applications won’t require their users to install a plug-in.
The main down side of the Feeling Engine? So far we’ve preferred to focus on development and performance optimization rather than marketing.
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paper video looks alright but very good just yet, I still basically completing some of the hard we were doing when simulating 3d back in flash 5 days . I take it that adobe is certainly going to buy Erain so they can better integrate it with flash.they already had this smaller version of swfit 3d importer for flash for flash mx, it didn’t work out because we need more then shape, cubes ect… all the cleaning still had to be done IN flash .
prerendered material look fine on flash and in vectors ,the rest will still have to be rendered completely and it will remain extra huge. you can better write a script around it tho. I don’t like the idea of playing around with typography in 3d .