I’d like to share a very small Molehill based 3D engine I’ve been developing lately. It’s called Minimole. It’s not intended for building complex 3D projects or supporting an extended feature set, but rather to expose how a 3D engine could be constructed on top of Molehill. It’s just for learning/experimentation purposes. If you’d like to understand how a complex, full featured 3D engine like Away3D’s Broomstick works, Minimole would be a great place to start.
Demo. – Flash Player 11 needed.
Keyboard arrows or WASD rotates the camera. Z and X moves the camera radially. Please be patient, the demo uses some pretty heavy textures (swf is 7mbs!) and there is no preloader 
Minimole uses Pixel Bender 3D basic shaders, so it is also a good test base for shader experimentation. Setting up new materials and PB3D shaders with it is very easy.
Its design is based on Broomstick. I tried to keep it as similar as possible interface-wise and not really care about copying stuff from it since this engine is not intended to replace Away3D, but learn from it. You can consider Minimole to be a hyper simplified, less efficient, not lighter version of Away3D. The only advantage over it is that it is easier to understand.
I don’t intend to take the engine much further than its current state, but you might expect it to be updated and fixed in the upcoming weeks. If you’d like to comment on it, make suggestions, questions, etc. Please do!
UPDATE: Added a few more experimental materials like PhongToonMaterial, VertexColorMaterial, XRayMaterial, EnviroSphericalMaterial, EnviroCubicalMaterial… The reflective materials don’t work properly yet because of some issues with PB3D, but they should be fixed as soon as Adobe makes a few updates on PB3D.
UPDATE1: WireframeMaterial. This is a resolution independent one-pass solid wireframe drawn with triangles.
Outstanding !
Glorious
Hi Li – Choons here from the Away3D Google Group. Trying to check out minimole but the demo isn’t loading for me even with waiting a long time to download. Is it working on your end?
well never mind- as soon as I posted that it started working ; ) Looks really cool!
( better late than never )
this is insane ! congrats and thank you for sharing
I’ll have a try as soon as I can.
Okay, got everything sorted out. For some reason the pb3dlib swc that was bundled with the minimole download wasn’t getting added to my project, grabbed the latest one from the PixelBender3D preview and it worked.
Yeah I imagine people using minimole could have these sort of problems. I’ve been busy with work and didn’t have time to play with Molehill since incubator 1, so Minimole isn’t entirely updated to this release.
I’d like to soon, but I just want to make clear that minimole was just an excercise for me (and anyone else curious) to get acquainted with the usage of the low level Molehill APIs in a 3D engine, so I don’t intend to update it and maintain it “usable”. The source is just there to show how things might work.
On the other hand, many people found minimole to be useful for PB3D shader development/learning. Regarding this, my plan is to focus on Away3D 4.x now so these sort of things can be used there. Once done, it should be even easier to play with PB3D than in Minimole.
For some reason the comment I posted before where I said how great the whole thing is for learning and experimenting with Molehill didn’t seem to submit. Thanks for making it available, it’s an excellent resource!