Justin Everett-Church, Senior Adobe Flash Player Product Manager, just posted a new demo showing off Flash Player 10’s new 3D capabilities. It’s a fabric demo that uses APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) to simulate the physics. This demo may look familiar to a previous papervision demo (which no longer seems to be live, sorry).

Justin’s Flash Blog

We recently had one of our interns slave over getting a Displacement Map Filter project off the ground and displaying a flat image in faux 3D. After long hours of slavery, his hard work paid off and we recieved this great tutorial that blows most out of the water. Great work Joel, now get me a damn cup of coffee!

lab.joelGillman.com › False 3D in Flash: Displacement Maps

Site is built in Flex and uses a flash 3D engine (Papervision?) to render the real-time 3D views of your layout.

[ via theFWA ]

There has been so much propoganda around Papervision, that I was unaware of other options. I was reading Zeh Fernando’s blog and he has been praising FIVe3D since it’s roots in AS2. According to Zeh, the difference with this engine is that it is vector based. As far as I can tell, this engine is only worth while when you don’t need to use a bitmap fill. I really can’t think of a time that I have/would need a vector only engine. If I do though, FIVe3D would be the way to go. It is a faster approach to text and vector textures than Papervision. It also seems there isn’t any online documentation either. Bummer…

[ via Zeh Fernando ]

There is a possible upcoming project that may involve video with perspective. I have been using Papervision for a couple of other projects and figured I would put together a demo to see how well it handles. Enjoy