What is the best Actionscript3 3D Engine?

Question

I am looking for a somewhat detailed explanation of which 3D Engine for Actionscript3 is the most efficient, practical, scalable, documented, community supported, etc. When

Answer 1

Personally, I much prefer Away; although it started off life as a Papervision fork, they've diverged a long way since then. Most times I start a new 3D project, I begin by evaluating both (the time elapsed between projects often gives both engines time to go through some pretty major changes), and I always end up coming back to Away - to my eye, the rendering quality is a bit better, and it seems to be easier to Just Get Stuff Done with Away. I've never used Sandy, so I can't speak for that.

I've never had a problem getting support from the Away community - while PV's may be bigger, Away's certainly isn't short of helpful people.

In my experience, PV tends to accumulate whizzy features more quickly - it's probably the more bleeding-edge and technically impressive engine - but Away tends to be more stable, has a nicer API and is easier to hack about with ;)

This is all very much my own opinion, YMMV. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. The best recommendation I can make is to evaluate both and see which works best for you.