Originally derived from Papervision3D, this engine has been almost completely rewritten, as his author Alexander Zadorozhny told me and other Ukrainian Flash Platform developers during our most recent meeting in the Kiev, Ukraine (that’s how UPFUG met for the first time). Alex demonstrated really cool demo of 3D editor built on top of the Away3D. Real environment maps does render pretty fast. True 3D mesh editing and objects transformations reminded me those beloved Maya tools. While this editor itself isn’t public at the moment due to customer’s request, there’s a bunch of Away3D tech demos available and Away3D engine itself is opensource: see the new Away3D project home page at the Google Code.
In the Engine Overview Demo the core features are shown, such as Texture projection, Mesh morphing, White lighting, Color lighting, Mesh morphing, Z ordering, Skybox, Perspective texturing, Level of details, Sprites, Meshes, Drawing, Mouse events, Bezier extrusion, wire primitives, Occlusion culling, Movie texturing, Transforms and Primitives.
Some unique features of Away3D were so well accepted by developers of the PV3D that Papervision3D has merged them back as official PV3D blog says. These features will be included in Papervision3D 2.0 release. There’s an Away3d Architecture Overview available: all about engine main concepts.
Read the Away3D FAQ and visit its original home page ??” its worthy.