The Away3d 2.4 & 3.4 update has been recently released on the Away3d.com site, with a completely revamped examples section, for both Flash 9 & Flash 10 versions. To grab your copy, head over to the svn or go straight to the downloads section of Away3d.com for a zip download of sources and examples.

many new features have been added to this release, including:

  • Vector graphics and fonts support.
  • Typed-checked loader support.
  • Geometry modifiers for exploding, welding, mirroring…
  • Depth material for creating depth masks.
  • Normalmap and Bumpmap generators from geometry.
  • Light pre-baking on textures.

plus the usual stability improvements and a ton of bugfixes. Documentation will soon be updated at away3d.com/livedocs

Special thanx must go to Guojian Wu of wu-media.com for his excellent new as3 library swfvector, which allows you to convert any shape outline or textfield in a swf into as3 data. This is used to great effect in the new release, easily enabling the drawing of textfields and shapes in 3d

The examples interspersing this post can be accessed by clicking on their images – each comes with it’s own source which can be downloaded by selecting “View Source” in the right-click menu. Or you can download these and other examples (both .as files and .fla files) by going to away3d.com/downloads. The Basic_Swf example also uses the excellent as3dmod library (which you can download from here) for producing the bend effect. Now you can twist and deform vector graphics in 3d, thanx to as3dmod, swfvector and Away3d 2.4 /3.4 :D

Enjoy the new release!