FreeSpin3D for Flash CS3 & CS4

During a R&D session today I've been looking into something I discovered over the christmas 2009 break while being forced to watch parental TV choices - Having used computers and video games since the age of 12 I find passive TV as entertainment rots my brain after a while. Thank god for laptops and an empty mind numbed by TV, which started over the xmas break to make work seem appealing in terms of stimulation.

Once of the more interesting things I researched was a nice 3d plugin for Flash, which promises no more number crunching with tough 3d tools like Papervision, and having to produce raw objects with code... which to the layman is basically like pulling teeth to make a basic wheel, or making a human being after first having to mess about designing all the DNA first, rather than just animating a clay figure.

FreeSpin3d is a cool plugin to extend Flash with real 3d game object capabilities that even enables import of standard 3DStudio .3ds files (with a 4000 polygon limit of course). So the theory is that you can build your models, then import them for use, it can even do tweens on the timeline for more simple animations, or of course the more attractive feature I'd be using - proper Actionscript scripted control for game & interface UI interactivity... which in my industry is exactly what I've been after - having been stuck with previous plugins like Flashloaded's 3DEnvironment, which wasn't real 3d, just a collection of flat flash movieclips rotating in a psuedo3d environment (like Doom almost). You can see an example of my experiments with this here on my website http://www.derekfoley.com

At the moment I'm just reading about FreeSpin3D. Seems promising so far, but like FlashLoaded's documentation the lack of Actionscript examples for the features they provide in the simplistic component parameters as usual like 3dEnvironment really lets it down - meaning it potentially could be a tough learning curve - and a risk for me to get our company Red Digital to invest in as a tool to use.

But what other alternatives are around? Papervision3D, whilst being very good requires a computer science and mathematics degree to operate past the most basic examples, so this could be good for us. Like most plugins, its going to be hard to make it work with client requests e.g. "can you make it do this".

The only other alternative is to build my own raw 3d code with pure maths... so this is definately attractive as its a big time saver and could lead us to provide some nice interactive menus and interfaces in a real 3d interface for a change rather than how I've done it before for our "Du" and "Nakheel" Holopro interfaces.