Flash
 Third Party Tools

Away3d is based on Papervision3D.  It’s organized a bit differently for performance.  Papervision has a nice neat API for setting up clean scenes and away3d requires a bit more technical knowledge, but you can achieve amazing effects. 

If you’re new to 3d and flash, papervision is a great way to start before moving on to a more complicated engine like away3d.

This was true for Away3D 1.0. The engine has been almost completely rewritten and we’ve added next to powerfull features, the most important one: the ease of use. Away3d is now, according to our users very friendly and even easyer to use than Pv…

http://away3d.com/downloads

Fabrice, thanks for taking the time to post over here.  I really love away3d, and can’t wait to use it for commercial projects.  I am a big fan of the work you guys do.  I should have clarified my viewpoint a bit further.  Away3D is definitely easy to use, but I feel it’s a bit more difficult to comprehend.  The package structure of pv3d was a bit simpler to understand when I was beginning.  I found all of the basic things (scenes, objects, viewport, camera, etc) to be in obvious places.  The more advanced classes that are typically not interacted with are nested deeper in the structure. 

I suppose it just takes an investment of time to learn it…and I think having more source code to look at would help a lot.  Is there any chance the source for normal mapping will be released any time soon?

You are absolutly right, that’s why since a few weeks we have a livedoc where users can add examples, remarks, snippets etc , a documentation per version, a collection of examples, fla’s+code in the svn and we are currently busy building tutorials for the more advanced stuff. Our mailing list can also be a good place to ask questions, some very talented people are on that list…