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I probably haven’t spent as much time as you reviewing these, but here is my opinion thus far.

Away 3D: primarily uses Objects to pass variables to their classes, which makes it easy for me to see and modify their examples.
(This has it’s draw backs as well)
if i were to change a camera object into a MovieClip, you would normally expect this error:

1067: Implicit coercion of a value of type flash.display:MovieClip to an unrelated type away3d.cameras:Camera3D.

but the compiler cannot catch Objects, as they are not Data Typed.  So we get this far less descriptive error:

TypeError: Error #1006: lookAt is not a function.
  at Intermediate_ZSortCorrection_fla::MainTimeline/initObjects()
  at Intermediate_ZSortCorrection_fla::MainTimeline/init()
  at Intermediate_ZSortCorrection_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()

However i cannot ignore the quality of the products display of 3D objects, particularly when hitting other objects or the camera, it handles all “clipping issues” perfectly, as far as i have seen.
http://www.flashkeep.com/away1.swf

I could use a good example of how to get a tiled texture though
http://www.closier.nl/playground/tiling.html

Papervision :
has disappointed me in many aspects so far.
Clipping issues are a huge problem here.
even when objects are not passing through each other, faces disapear when they are even close…  plus camera clipping is terrible.

when you make a cube, you give it a width, height, and depth, and you have access to none of these properties from that point forward.

Sandy:
I have tried to get the sandy examples up and running even from the svn location…  i receive various errors, but its probably more my fault than theirs, and perhaps i should be using flex with their product anyway.

I have looked through their demos, enough to see that clipping/depth sorting is not as big of a problem as it is with papervision…  but have not seen any demos of objects passing through each other and how they would look.

the sandy examples do not include the .swf files which would have been a good reference for me as i could not compile the flas my self.

I think my preferred 3d engine is away3D so far, but i will keep an ear open for sandy3D…  also i am greatly looking forward to Sharikura, it seems extremely efficient from the demos i have seen.

Does Away3D and Sandy3D support 3dsMax and google Sketch Up models?  through Collada like Papervision does?

other 3D engines I found, although I’m not sure if any are note-worthy:

five3D
freespin3D

and there are several engines supporting physics for various 3D engines, one such engine is WOW.

Brian, I mostly agree with your opinion. Both Away and Sandy have parsers for Collada-files (quite a few people seem to use Python-based Blender to create their Collada-files, a method which I also tried), Away additionally supports generic .DAE, as far as I remember.

Sandy can parse ASE-files if you are looking for a quick way from 3DMax to Flash.

However, I found that none of the existing parsers offers enough control over the created output, so I ended up writing a custom parser for Coobico, which can be fed with VRML…

haha gut aha

Hello Lutz,
I was watching your website and the incredible story board (concept art) pages. You are doing an incredible work (and I work in flash games industry ).

As the lead developer of Sandy, I’m glad you consider to use this API for the game. Until now, we have few succesful 3D games done with Sandy, and some more are coming. That is the proof that Sandy is a capable engine.
We are making some good efforts to improve the library even if not a lot of “visible” updates are available, but the svn moves quite fast. Parsers have been improved, and hopefully performance too.

Do not hesitate to contact us through Sandy forum to get some advices/help

Dear Thomas, thanks a lot—I can just return the compliment for your great work with Sandy (and for sharing it with all of us). Now, we do not yet have fixed the whole 3D-back-end, so at the moment I can’t say if we will really stick with Sandy or not. But I would nonetheless fully recommend Sandy for any professional project. Your range of tutorials and the very helpful forum really set you apart from the rest of the pack.

Any chance of open-sourcing VRML parser?

makc, the parser is made-to-measure for our game-engine and thus not really useful for the public. But I can post a quick tutorial on the underlying principles to provide you with a starting-point. Stay tuned…

Hi Lutz,

gibt es einen Testlink (privat?), der den Einsatz der Engine zeigt? Mich interessiert vor allen Dingen die Performance der Szene.

cheers
Max

Hallo Max, z.Zt. leider noch nicht. Wir werden aber entsprechende Gameplay-Videos veröffentlichen, sobald wir alle Kernbereiche implementiert haben.

spammer fail!

you might want to close comments on this, spammers are taking it over…

Away 3D: primarily uses Objects to pass variables to their classes, which makes it easy for me to see and modify their examples.

I do not see how this makes any difference at all.

Sandy’s code is more professional and it looks like the programmers are actual Software Engineers ... Away3D code is not as good… just take a look at the Number3D class in Away 2.2… YUK! Never thought a vector class would have TWO matrices in it… Bloated.