trace(myBitmapdata);

Think I have something here. This demo shows my last progress om the directional phong shading.
It start looking good, performance seams ok, while i have not even tried yet to improve code on speed.

In this case my light definition is not defined as it should, has no radius, as a result lightning comes equally projected onto the models.
So I think I know where I should focus...

I must say I'am very pleased about this result. Specially the information of smooth shadow enhance greatly the visuals...
Hope to post soon more... and i'll try to use something else than that turtle model!

While busy working on smooth shading, i thought it would be nice to show some steps of my progress.
This demo shows only the softshading with a front lightning...

I hope to finish the directional smooth shading soon if I can find more time.
By directional i mean that instead of having a light coming from front like this demo shows, i'm able (if I forget the bugs i still have)
to apply the same fx but according to the light position... it looks pretty cool... until i get some errors

I've turned 40 this weekend, so i thought it would be nice to celebrate...
Lets make a birthday cake! Nah... doesn't shine...
Since Away3D is now able to create anything looking expensive like gold or silver, i thought, what's the expensivest on earth? Diamonds of course!

Everyone who has played with transparent objects, knows that you need alpha info, and then... well here it comes, what comes next? You need something to move light! So most go for double geometry, above each other. Did that too, but then you get that zsorting artifact, all faces are swapping on and off. Useless.
So i've updated the enviroMaterial again to render faces another way...

Enjoy the Away3D diamond! The right amount of shinyness and face count!

It's been a while since my last post.I thought it might be good to let see we are VERY busy right now with Away3D.
One of the latest feature, like this demo shows, is the normal mapping. Now natively implemented in the engine.

Any mesh using this new Material will reflect the environement or a given reflection map.

But wait that's not all, this is the first of this kind of materials...
How would you find being able to add phong shading coming from a given light source to your model??
I mean by this: NOT only front lightning!

Check this blog or away.com to see soon some really nice stuff!
Away3D rocks people!

k, Back to code now... too much fun!

PS: Open the Flash menu, and select away stats if you want some fps details...

Update
Made some tests last nite.
Code seams stabile and perform pretty well no matter model geometry being loaded...
Tried a 4206 faces overkill head model. FPS dropped down to 2fps and on init of the mesh the head.obj needed arround 2 seconds to intialize due to enormous amount of precalculations. The hummingbird model however
with a respectable 974 faces was running at a steady 25 fps very smootly.
I will try to improve the code in the comming days...