With this new release (2.135), Prefab enters new grounds.
Till now the app allowed you to generate, modify, and convert your 3D content.
A quick skybox test, lights sets, code help, vertex animation fix, test your skeleton anim, export your model to awd2 etc..
But if you work on a game level, extended scenery. Where you may need to work for hours on a project, in a team...
It was simply not possible as you could not save your work.

Now you can save!

This new version allows you to save multiple projects, swap between them,
I even pushed the game a bit further, every 5 min after you last time that you saved, Prefab will generate a backup file for you!

Everything you do into Prefab will now be saved in a tiny binary file that you can reload at will.
This means that not only meshes are restored, but all your lights, your methods, skyboxes, behaviours, multiple animations of different types, multiple material meshes, full materials with normal and specular maps.
It is also ready for the new stuff that I'll add very soon. think here of lightmaps, secondery uv set generation, edits, paths...
Prefab continues to function as previously too. You still can use it to convert or test on the fly.
But if you want to use it to build more complex enviroments/models, now you can!
Prefab AS3 exports do reproduce also all methods, animations and material. Lighting and behaviours too, but into the PrefabProject class that comes with the outputs, so you can implement all these goodies the way you want.

Next to this massive update, many things were improved/fixed. On top of my head, the export folder issue on Windows, skybox clearance, faster exports, parsing progress, export progress, some null errors on vertex animation generation and many other things here and there.

As usual, if you have a request, found a bug, want to say hi, drop me a mail.
As many requested it, I'll try make asap a video tutorial and will provide
probably some demo projects with it ( because now I can! )

I'll hope you'll enjoy this release like I do.

Fabrice

The Away3D Team is pleased to announce the final production ready version of the the Away3D 4.0 engine!

Read more on mothership

I've promissed a while ago that I would release Prefab3D for Flash 11/Away3D 4.0 once a minimum set of features would be up&running.
This morning, I was about to break it to add an extra functionality but then realized:
The day I can release Prefab3D version 2 has finally arrived!

Just before hit the link (top right button on the page) and try it, let me explain a bit why it took so long since the last Prefab3D 1 update and what kind of beast you will actually discover...

Process
It's been a lot of work. simply because building a 3D app is, well, lots and lots of work!
At first, when the great Molehill project was still a secret prerelease program,
I thought: we have gpu now, we'll have soon a new API, then I'll port the v1 code and voila.

Yeah, right.

At that time, it was not possible to work on the app, as we first needed to rewrite from the ground up the early draft of what is now Away3D 4.0. Each new player drop releases were breaking or asking for new stuffs. I couldn't get started properly on the AIR side either, because there was no AIR with Stage3D. The first beta SDK+runtime came 6 months later...

To be honest, it's not about the player or the runtime: I had no idea of what having gpu access really means. Everything you do, needs to be able to handle loads of data. Prefab's v1 internals were simply not built with this in mind. Oh sure, I tried hard to save the most code I could. Eventually, I got tired never see anything else but errors, (lots of ) code commented out or white screens. Short story: I decided to rewrite the entire app from scratch.
As the team focus was to get a robust Away3D up&running. I've restarted the work on Prefab 2 seriously only 4 or 5 months ago.

The Baby
So what do you get exactly for this kind of effort? Not that much actually. At least on the exposed side. Most work done was on the AIR side, app logic, exporters api and a few exporters, an extended selection api, material edits, lights edits, animation managers etc... If the app is relatively limited feature wise atm, It can already do lots and learning to work with it should keep you of the streets for a while!

Many features are "almost" done on my disk, waiting for small problems to be solved before I can implement them. Such as awd 2 (the format 2.0 was locked just 2 weeks ago) with materials and animation exports or Prefab's own project files. You will notice for instance an md2 export option. This doesn't make much sense without a vertex animator/generator...

There are probably issues here and there. (some are even known). Also with new things such as export to ThreeJS or the new behaviors "guys" api that is in very early stage. So please use the report panel so I can fix/improve or simply to give me feedback. If you are one of the 30k+ user of the first version. You know you can expect a lot of automatic updates in the upcoming months.
You do not have to uninstall the previous one, as both can work together. I would keep both, at least until older features such as path edits and uv edits are restored. V2 will no longer export to AS3 for Flash 9 and 10.

I hope you will enjoy this new version even in its "LE" state and that It will find a little place into your workflow.

Last but not least: I would like to thank a LOT the Adobe player & AIR teams for the work they did in the past 2 years.

Fabrice

Following the recent Adobe announcement at the Flash Gaming Summit keynote, we are pleased to announce the first public build of the Away3D 4.0 engine for Flash 11. This release leverages the GPU support of the Molehill APIs, which are included in a version of the Flash Player now available as a new form of public release on Adobe Labs known as an Incubator build.

The Incubator build of Flash 11 was announced at FGS alongside an accompanying Air 3 Incubator build, allowing GPU-accelerated Flash content to be viewed both in the browser and on the desktop. These builds are part of Adobe’s new program for bringing in-development features of upcoming features of the Flash Player to a public release ahead of a fully stable beta release, and so are not intended for commercial use at this time. However, we think this approach is a vast improvement over previous strategies for Flash Player releases – offering anyone interested the opportunity to test and give feedback on new features as they are developed.This should lead to a final build that is focused on compatibility and stability – something that is crucial with a release that relies on the compatibility of GPU hardware.

Of course, this release also means that we can finally let out of the bag some of the features we’ve been developing for Molehill. The following screenshots link to a selection of demos whose source code is now available for download from our googlecode repository or the downloads page. In order to run these demos, you’ll need to follow the instructions for installing the Flash 11 Incubator build on Adobe Labs. In order to compile the source, you’ll also need to follow the instructions for installing and compiling files for Flash Player 11 & AIR 3.

With GPU rendering, all visual ouput of Away3D is handled by the GPU, freeling up all CPU cycles for other tasks. This now allows much more details simulations to be rendered, as the above demo shows. The water effect uses Shallow Water Simulation equations with a mesh plane constructed from 80,000 triangles that are updated by the CPU in realtime. The rendering on the GPU uses an Environment map to create a reflective surface effect with a realism never before seen in Flash.

However, the shading capabilities of Molehill can create far more complex shading effects. In the demo here, the imported model (a 3D Head Scan by Lee Perry-Smith, based on a work at www.triplegangers.com, licensed under Creative Commons) uses a sub-surface scattering shader to create an ultra-realistic skin texture effect. Away3D 4.0 has a completely revamped materials package that allows easy use of complex shader techniques such as specular maps, normal maps and shadow mapping.

Another area given a complete overhaul in the new Away3D engine is animation. The GPU offers us the possibility of accelerated animation calculations which again frees up CPU cycles for other work – the only restriction being the amount of animation data which must be small enough to be upload to the GPU’s memory. The example above uses a new AS3 exporter for bones animation written by Jerome Birembaut, which converts 3ds MAX skins and animations to AS3 classes that can be compiled direct into your Away3D project for any animation sequence or animation rig.

MD5 files are also supported, allowing any model built using the Quake 3 format to be used in Away3D 4.0. These also use a bones animation format but are saved as external compressed binary files (in a similar way to the Quake 2 MD2 format) that can be loaded and processed at runtime. The demo below loads several MD5 animations that can be applied to the same model - use the cursor keys to walk around and spacebar to attack!

At present, Away3D 4.0 is alpha software and so, like the Incubator build of Flash 11, should only be used for the purposes of testing and prototyping. To identify this release we have used the codename Broomstick, both on the downloads page and in the svn directories. We are also pleased to announce that as from today, Away3D is now available on github! Please register on our google group at http://groups.google.com/group/away3d-dev for updates on Broomstick, new demos, upcoming conference appearances and training!

The Away3D Team

With Prefab3D 1.5 it is now possible to extend the app capabilities via plugins. So in order to test all the distribution mechanics under the hood and possibly interrest someone to extend Prefab, I've written a little geometry editor: MeshEdit and added it to the loop.

In its first version, this little utility is far from being user friendly, it misses history, mouse rect selection, vertex features...
but even as is, it should ease up some common tasks and prevent the need to go back to your original 3d editor. You know, the few faces with inverted normals, that extra hole you miss, the face that you forgot to delete, the door hole you forgot to make...
Using it is pretty straight forward: select a mesh in Prefab, under the newly added "plugins" menu, select MeshEdit. Your model will now be displayed and you are now able to affect its geometry. If you cancel or close the window, nothing happends. If you apply, then your changes will be applied to the selected mesh.
Let's hope I can find some spare time to polish this baby a bit more. In meanwhile, if you have remarks or wishes for this tool, please let me know.

Probably this week, another plugin will be added to Prefab, this time made by someone else... To install these extensions you have nothing to do: just say "yes" to the install dialog if one pops up.

Have fun with MeshEdit!

This week, I've uploaded what is probably the last major update for the Flash 10 version of Prefab3D. With 1.5, I've tried to close the 1.x chapter with improved code, ui enhancements and like in most of my .dot releases, I've added a few new features as well.

Here's a little list of what has been done since 1.4.

and probably few more code changes here and there...

I hope you will enjoy this new release!

For the most of us, Flash 3d fans, seeing the AMAZING capabilities of the next Flash Player is a torture.
On one side you can't keep your pants dry by looking at the few fantastic demos posted during the last days and you just can't get rid of this very large smile on your face. The whole day dreaming of the game you plan to do for years, the one that will shake the planet. How Steve's "thoughts on Flash" post looks silly now. You look back at the last 2 weeks where you spend your time mostly trying to fix these damn sorting issues on that avatar... ahaha yeah, no more.
You wish you could travel in time to release day and already be busy writing that game that will put gameconsoles out of business... waiting is killing us.

Well prepare for a cold shower, because this baby is not some mickey mouse toy added to the Flash timeline. It's a wild mustang!
Do not expect to ride it that easy like previous ones when it comes to the new 3D Graphics with Hardware Acceleration API. This player is a serious high tech piece and it will require some time and experience before you'll be able to print something that looks good on screen. Take my word for it, at least if like me, you have zero background in gpu talks. I got my cold shower and the water just starts become warmer. But wooohooo this shower feels good!

Fortunatly for most of us, highlevel AS3 3D API's such as Alternativa3D, Yogurt3D, Flare3D, Sophie3D, Minko and of course Away3D will ease all these tasks for you and enable you to work almost as you used to. This means for Away3D that it will change here and there. Probably true for the other engines as well. Even if we try to keep it as familiar as possible, it's to be expected.

For me this big leap means a shit load of extra work! Being one of the lucky basterds able to "play" dayly with Molehill features for a few months now. I realize better now what's ahead of me regarding Prefab3D: I would need to rewrite a big (read big big) bunch of Prefab in order to support fully the new player.
With almost 15000 users now, even if it makes me very very proud, it also makes me very responsible. When a platform changes that much, it often means the death of many projects. They become obsolete. It's the moment where you ask yourself if a project has a reason to be continued. In case of Prefab, I'm truly convinced it becomes even more relevant than ever to have dedicated tools to work with. If you have adopted Prefab in your workflow, you will be able to continue use it! I will do all I can, together with the Away team, to make this happend on player release which should also be Away3D 4.0 release day.

In fact I've already started, but working atm on isolated cases only, as I do not have yet AIR builds for mac that would allow me to proceed faster. (Someone gets spammed really often for this )
The idea behind Prefab3D was to fill the gap between your 3d apps and Away3D. Get rid of the overhead of data that Flash can't handle, act as a test environement, ease many processes, dedicated exports for all Away3D engine versions and types etc... It just left the widget status for an app one.

For the 2.0, this concept will remain of course, but because the player will offer a more 1/1 talk with the most popular 3d editors and because we finally enter big boyz terrain business and production wise, the app needs to evolve forward as well. It will support (at least that's the plan) other aspects of the production, where coding, testing, generating and assembling will get more or less the focus. But this will not happend over night as if I look behind me, there's noone but me and my Away3d mates.
So first goal will be to ensure we have a working version available when the player will be released doing more or less what its already doing now.
During the coming weeks, I'll be therefor deving 2 versions at the same time, not sure yet if I'll keep separated apps (1.x for 9/10.1 and >2.0 for next players) or build some kind of mix... Only one thing is sure: I'll probably be quiet on our dev group. Sorry for that by advance.

For now, we are still in F10 realm, and I'm happy to present you 1.4. I've just uploaded a new update, version 1.430. I hope you will enjoy the new tools and enhancements even if it's not as fast as it hopefully will become!

Here is on top of my head, a list of new features and fixes done for this 1.4 version:

and probably more here and there...

Cheers!

Oh almost forgot: I want to add "en passant" a big thank to Adobe for giving us Molehill and having me in prerelease program from day one and express my admiration for the Flash player dev team.

For the release of Away3D 3.6, together with Influxis, we've builded a realtime 3D multiplayer prototype from the ground up.
You can read more here on away3d.com. I'm not a good writter, but I've tried here to explain a bit more in depth some aspects of the building process that might help you if you decide to build one yourself.. (or not)

I have done a few FPS projects using the BSP feature of the engine already, but so far, none of them were as extended as this one. The goal was to test stress a bit the capabilities of the engine, Prefab and the new player. The plan was to build a huge map just to see how far you could go. I was not certain if Prefab would stand the experience. If the player would be able to handle that much data and pretty unsure it would run at all in combo with the P2P API..
Having no material to compare but my previous projects, I was also curious about how much time would be involved. With only 2 1/2 weeks left before my planned summer vacation, the demo was supposed to be showed in Mineapolis, USA, 4 weeks later. Time to get started.

The prototype
You probably already have tried it by now and saw that it turned out pretty well. Tho there are still some processes between the P2P and the 3D generating slowdowns sometimes, especially on the mac side. The mapping is not 100%, some maps could use improvements etc... Its a prototype.
Considering all is done in the evenings in just 4 weeks, I'm very happy with the results of this prototype. I want also compliment the Flash player devteam, they really made an amazing work on this release.

Where do you start exactly?
If you plan to build a similar project, first thing to do is to make some tests before make the jump. Just to become familar with Away, Prefab and the BSP specific coding. Modeling for BSP technic is not complex, but there are rules you must follow. If you don't, chances are high, you'll never pass the generation step in Prefab.
You can read some of them on David's blog and on our dev group.

Planning
Probably the most important step: plan your work! Both on the map and designs.
Building a complex map, becomes quickly very hard to model and art impressions/sketches are very welcome. In this case, I've started collecting images on google related to tunnels, concrete, prisons etc..
Once my mood board was ready, it was time to define the map. So a bit like an architect, I've defined the layers into Illustrator, made some sketches on paper. I say, "bit like", because since it's a shooter game, the way you think of a building must not reflect the reality at all. Having real building ideas does lead to lots of dead ends, low ceilings, single doors rooms, equal levels... instead, you need think more in term of escapes, strategy. The gameplay and map features are also affecting the map. Such as power lifts and transporters seen in this project. They should exist into your blueprint.
Of course it's always possible to modify or add while you model, but in practice, it turns often into a painful task. So again, do not skip this step, invest in the "thinking" work before start anything.

Modeling
The modeling on itself, as said above requires some experience, but in case of extended maps like this one, it's important that you take an extra care during the build. As you can easylly forget to close a hole, invert a face normal... Finding these later on can be very tedious. Make sure you have your grid set to coarse, that the "snap to grid" option is on. As the tree must remain as simple as possible for best results, ask yourself all the time: if it can be named floor, wall, stairs or ceiling, then it's likely it should be part of the tree. If not, items such as doors, tables, chairs etc, should be added to the tree later on. Consider as well to add geometrical complexities later on like ceilings details, detailed windows etc... At this stage, you will really appriciate your blueprint as the model becomes very quickly a series of enclosed shapes sometimes difficult to inspect/access or even identify. You might also hate yourself if you have not prepared the blueprints properly
During the build, it's also a good idea to export and inspect the model into Flash or Prefab.

For this project I've used AC3D, which is in my eyes one of the best 3D editor around. After the demo was done, I've added .ac file supports (import/export) to both Away3D and Prefab3D. Wish I did this before

Texturing
Then comes the texturing. During the build, if you plan to use Prefab, make sure you to define the map as a series of meshes. Project the uv's on each part and make sure they are not overlappings. If you plan to use tiling, it will have to be defined in your Away3D project later on. (Prefab3D is not able to prebake this kind of mapping)
You do not need to work with real texture, but you should use a few tmp textures of different colors which help greatly to spot eventual uv mapping errors. It will help you visually to identify the rooms, as it can be confusing at times.
Once the map is done, simply load it into Prefab, make sure the bounderies of the model are between 20 and 100k (rule of thumb based on my previous experience), if not, rescale in your app or Prefab. Open the generator window, set the camera properly and hit the btn...
At this stage if errors or warnings are triggered, look at the region defined as a red cube in the main window (if you close the generator window, this red region will be cleared).
Inspect highly zoomed in outline mode your model in your editor and make sure there are no holes. Repeat. The generation is pretty much a smooth ride from Prefab, look at the video from my previous post to see it in action.

Prefab3D
With over 220 maps mostly at 512x512 sizes for the tree only (+- 250 for total project), Prefab was simply reaching its limits. Only fast rendering was possible. Memory demand was so huge (440 maps in total, original + rendered), raytracing rendering was simply not possible in one pass. At this stage, if you haven't done it yet in your 3D editor, it's a good idea to rename each parts with good names, as they will be the only way for you to access/edit the materials later on at runtime, via the CentralLibrary class.

Yeah! First Export worked!
Once you have successfully generated and exported (as+awd files), you can now make your first steps into your world. Before start build the textures, do the prebaking etc... make sure everything's ok, try go to each and every corners, place to see if you get stuck. In many cases, the camera bounds are related to these problems. In case your camera box is tiny and you still get stuck at a certain place, go back to your original model and try move the vertexes representing the plane so that they are no longer parallel by just a grid increment. I can happend at T junctions.
If you want to use Prefab raytracer, a work around would be to slice your model per groups of rooms, and render. Then use these maps for the final model. I hope be able to improve some internal processes in that regard in future releases.

You are not there yet
After days of work, you have successfully imported your precious data into away and you are finally able to enter your world. finetuned the camera bounds, tested the collisions, it all looks pretty...
Now what?
So far, only the geometry, designs were made, its time now to code the game itself...
I will not extend much on this as its a per case thing. For the prototype, as we wanted to build a shooter, you need of course guns. So I've wrote a "projectile factory" for this. Basically since we wanted to have different sorts of weapons, polymorphysm was the way to go. By pressing the "e" key in the demo you can toggle runtime 2 types of weapons. I was running out of time so I haven't added more, but you'll get the idea. (I might even post the sources if there's enough animo)
David helped me a lot to implement new features for impact detection, uv retreiving etc.. to the BSP package that should allow you to easylly access this kind of information. In parallel David also improved a lot the way dynamic objects are handeled by Away. In short, without David, this demo would simply not run at all!
On the P2P side, Sean, was busy writing the final pieces to his API, and Rob was busy implementing the update events from the Battlecell P2P API on the weapons and avatars hooks that I've had previously written for that. At this stage, I was only just a few days from a well deserved vacation, so Federicco came to the rescue and took over the modeling and animation of the Avatar, helped me build few extra textures, made a beautifull splash screen and updated the previous interface overlay as Rob needed a scalable version not knowing what res the beamers would have for his presentation.

The Avatars
if you are familiar with BSP technics, you probably know that moving an object into the nodes of a BSP tree means that it needs to be tesselated at runtime. The avatar being an animated model having even as low poly as +-150 polys, if you have a few of these running around, it can have a desastrous impact on the perf.
If you have made a room, and entered it with another player, if you come closer to the avatar of your enemy you might notice some pixelly look if you get near of it. In the practice, noone remarks it, because if you come too near, its most likely you will be killed before you even notice anything!

So the answer we gave to this problem was to add a single 2 triangles plane per avatar facing the camera at all times. Then draw onto the plane texture the avatar model considering its animation state and projecting it with both its transformations and the camera point of view. All this magic is signed by the master of matrix Rob himself. You can really measure how smart and efficient this solution is, if you have seen the before and after. Trust me on that.

That's pretty much all the process we went through in big lines.. feel free post a question if you have some.

oh yes, like Steve would say: one more thing. If you are a "company", make sure you do work with people knowing their stuff. If not, you might enter hell instead of your 3D world... Even if we did it in just 4 weeks, all having different schedules and activities, its very easy to spend way more.

This was a pretty long post, I just hope that despite my lousy english, this article has brought bits of light on some of the aspects of building such project using Away3D. It shouldn't be very different using other engines/tools tho.

The keys
It's not on away3d.com, so here are the keys in case you haven't discovered them yet:
e, toggles the weapons,
wasd or keys up/down/left/right moves you
q or j to jump
space to fire
shift to run
and mouse press to rotate. (the Mouse class doesn't give us more option)

In order to log in with someone else, use a room name such as away3d1 or away3d2...
Note that for this prototype, you can have only 4 avatars per room.

It's been a few weeks since version 1.3 was released, even published a few maintance updates for this version (latest being 1.375) but due to other activities such as 2 FPS environments, a brand new Editor and few other 3D things (will post on these later on), I never got the time to even write a few lines about Prefab in here. Sorry for that!

Today, almost a year after I've typed the first lines of Prefab code, the counter of unique installs in my DB stands at near 11000. This makes me very happy and shows Away3D is very alive!

Chances are high you are already aware of the 1.3 changes
but here's a short list of the new features and some of the fixes made for this version (the one's I can recall). Internally next to fixes, lots has been done as well, but will be probably visible only in 1.4. Such as plugin's and SDK, projects, hierarchy tool, multiple selections etc...

primitive generator

Highlites for this update 1.3 were:

Obvious fixes:

and more...

The BSP/PVS generator feature in action

The new UV cropper: here the original mapping+map. Most of the map is unused, as a result lots of data needs to be loaded for nothing.

Once the cropping is done, map is 1/1 respected, but holds only the region you need. Try this on your project, you'll be amazed at the data you can spare if you have a large project. You can apply to the selected object only or the whole project.

The glow map feature was also enhanced. Here in action on a project I've been working on.

The same example from another angle showing the before and after Prefab did its little magic.

Some rendering improvements were made as well. Note that since its prebakking, the way your model is mapped affects greatly the results, especially when using "own shadow".
Notice here the added 32 bits support: the light goes through the "glas" of the window.

Some performance issues where unsane CPU usage were recorded, due to a massive bug in the AIR runtime 2.2 should be resolved by now with the latest AIR update 2.3 that Adobe just released.
If you still experience some problems, please notice me with a way to reproduce, and I'll pass on to the Adobe AIR dev team.

Next update I'll try improve among other things the rendering speed and enable larger project handling. My latest project was holding 230 maps, mostly 512x512, and honestly, I think it was really the limit for the app as it is builded now

Again, sorry for being so silent lately, I'll try change that.
Happy Away3D with Prefab3D!

Update Prefab3D 1.208 available

In this update:

and more...

Get Prefab3D

Little video showing the new path features.