We've put together a simple-to-use, scriptable 3D editor / animator, which uses Away3D under the hood. You can see it at: http://world.edsploration.org/ .
There isn't a lot of documentation there yet, but I hope (pray) that it's easy enough to figure out just by looking at it. The purpose is for creating 3D-based educational content. It's built around the concepts of EduSim / OpenCobalt, but something that you can arrive at simply by clicking a link, rather than installing a program. It needs to be easy enough for overworked-teachers to use without having to spend much time learning, powerful enough for technophiles to do a lot with, and secure enough for school system administrators to consider valuable. And it needs to be open-source, using open formats, so that it can be easily used in the developing world. Simplicity is in the user interface. It's not nearly as powerful as Prefab or Maya, or possibly even Sketchup, nor is it intended to be. It's intended to work /with/ those systems, and load models created by those systems, and export things that those systems can manipulate. (Thank you, ObjExporter!) When you need per-point control, edit models in those other systems, then load them here. When you need a simple animator, this is the place to turn. Power is in the D.eval scripting engine. Although I'm a little wary of the licensing, it is free, and it gets the job done - and does it really well. It has full access to the whole Flash / Flex environment. In the example loaded, if you look at the "library" code, you'll see that the functions in there control the Object3D objects' alpha values directly - all in script code. I didn't make any fancy hooks (other than a generic callback-wrapper), it's all done automagically by the script engine. Security is in the Flash player itself. Everything in this program runs inside of Flash, and is restricted by the standard Flash player sandbox. Thus, whatever your views of Flash security in general, this is an equal security risk to navigating in your browser to a random web page and having that page load a Flash file. And school system administrators already allow that. (So when I add link following, it will reload the engine, rather than load things directly inside. Yet another reason to shrink the program.) ---- The intent is to release this open-source, with a plugin-based architecture, for anyone to use / extend / modify / etc. And, with a plugin-based architecture, that will make it easier to separate out different chunks of code that fall under different licenses, provide support for different versions of Away3D, support different script engines, etc. So a standard set of content-type requirements is probably in order before that goes /too/ far. The only reason I'm holding off, for the moment, on releasing the source code is simple code-elegance: the current code is not elegant, and not something I want to show people with my name on it. It was literally /thrown/ together as I experimented with connecting this with that, etc., etc., and while it doesn't need to be anywhere near perfect for an initial code release, it does have to at least not make /me/ cringe. :-P So, yeah - you'll get load / save soon, and you'll get the code as soon as I can make time for a basic cleanup. - Bibek
