I've been tinkerin with the new flex 2.0 Beta and what started as an effort to test ActionScript 3.0 math performance turned into something considerably more. Having always had a facsination with 3D math, I decided to write a simple 3D engine in flex 2 thinking it might be useful someday. While the usefulness remains to be seen, I had a lot of fun building this thing. Here are some of the highlighted features:

• XML model definition
• Ploygon surface styles (fill color, line color, alphas)
• Symmetry math to mirror a model (see the face demo)
• Vertex tweening so you can control a vertex’s movement
• Animation Sequences to combine multiple vertex tweening groups 
  • see the talking and/or kiss animations in the face demo

!!!DEMOS!!! Note: These flex demos require Flash Player 9 or higher..

Check out this app to demo the basic concepts of the engine.

And now check this out to see all the features maxed out! (source model (Careful, it will probably max out your CPU too but it's still pretty cool).

The face model was inspired by something that sparked my interest a few years back by Ken Perlin. After I built my 3D stuff, I happened across his site again and noticed he had his model definition in the html. I scraped out his vertices and poly mappings and created lisa.xml to feed my engine during a 4 hour layover in Chicago Midway. It actually rendered pretty well.

I'm not sure where I plan on going with this from here. To really make this useful would at least take building a proper model building tool. I will probably just wash my hands from it and call it a great learning experience. If you are interested in the source code, let me know by comment here and if there is enough interest, I'll just post it on my site.