The Sandy 1.0 beta has been released. Sandy is a Flash 3D API, and there’s nothing else like it, if you want to be able to do real-time 3D rendering in Flash. I’ve tried almost everything else that is available on the internet for Flash 3D, and nothing else goes so far beyond being a toy demo. I’ve tried out the first and the second releases of Sandy, too, and it just keeps getting better. One change in this release is that now it’s possible to draw curved faces. Another is the addition of an ASE parser. The remaining changes can be read here.

Sandy can be difficult to learn if you’re not already experienced in doing 3D programming. Being more of a breadth-first than a depth-first learner, and being used to filling in the gaps as I go along with new programming projects, I had expected to learn Sandy more quickly than I did. What I found was that I needed to first learn the basics of 3D programming in order to know what method to call when, and what kind of arguments to pass to it. If I can learn basic 3D programming math, though, anybody can. If you’re wondering whether you can learn to do 3D programming in FLash, take heart, because it’s much easier to learn math when you are motivated by your own selfish use for it, than when it’s only an abstract, academic exercise.