Recently, I was having a weird issue with shading flickering while working on a project with Away3D. I wanted to use basic lighting with the WhiteShadingBitmapMaterial class.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and said that Flash Player 9′s 3D options are just as great as those available in Flash Player 10? No. That’s because you would never do that. Never.

In the world of Flash Player 9, you aren’t given too many 3D options. Papervision and Away3D. Those two seem to be the most stable and full-featured. How do you rotate an object to a particular rotation over time? When integrated with a physics engine (I was using JigLib), this isn’t so simple. Both engines have a great lookAt() method that will rotate your object in a particular direction, however I wanted to do this gradually, not instantaneously.

This post goes through a few tests we did to see what type of features and performance we could get out of flash 8 in the 3D realm, while keeping the code base small and light.