Looking for a 3D renderer in Flash

May 18, 2008 2:18 PM

Is anyone aware of a general-purpose 3D renderer built with Flash? Sort of like a Flash version of those VRML plugins that were all the rage in 1997, only without the suck? I'm creating a browser game, and I'd like the main viewport to display 3D images. I could render images on the server and feed them to the client, but the demand on server CPU and bandwidth would be prohibitive. I'd love to find a client-side solution.

What I'm hoping for, ideally, is a .swf file to which I can feed 3D models (via JavaScript, probably—as XML, perhaps), which will then display those models using the camera angles, lighting, etc. that I specify. It doesn't have to support animation, but if it does, then hey, great.

I don't even know what you'd call something like this, but it seems like it should exist. Any clues?

posted by greenie2600 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I haven't used this yet, but take a look at Papervision 3d. It's free and opensource, but I'm not sure about the 3d model formats it supports, but it's a starting point.
posted by Alterscape at 2:32 PM on May 18, 2008

Oops, you should probably look at the blog first -- the front page is just a (quite pretty) demo. (There's a non-obvious "take me to the rest of the site" icon in the upper-left corner).
posted by Alterscape at 2:39 PM on May 18, 2008

Alterscape, that is really cool - better than I was hoping for. I'm gonna download this now and see what I can get it to do. Thanks!
posted by greenie2600 at 2:51 PM on May 18, 2008

Ah - looks like I'd have to do some ActionScripting to make this work. I'm terrible with Flash (and I don't own it), so I don't think that's going to happen.

I'd imagine that a skilled Flash developer could turn this into the tool I've described, though...you'd basically just need to write a connector between Flash's JavaScript API and the rendering engine. That task will have to fall to someone other than me, though.

Still, cool toy...
posted by greenie2600 at 3:10 PM on May 18, 2008

I don't think you're going to find any really good solution to this. Flash is interpretive, and any flash solution will not be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration, so while what you want may relieve the load on your server, for any non-trivial scene it's going to grind the local machine's CPU into the ground.
posted by Class Goat at 4:20 PM on May 18, 2008

I thought Flash supported this with its own built-in renderer... Ah, it looks like GPU support and 3D are only for the upcoming Flash 10. In the meantime, Swift 3D seems to be popular.
posted by Monochrome at 6:37 PM on May 18, 2008