I am feeling pretty comfortable with Flash and i'm looking for something to take it to the next level. The next step comes in the way of 3d animation. I really don't want to spend the rest of my life learning a 3d program, and I am not looking to do photo quality 3d graphics. All I want to do is have 3d effects that are clean and simple. I decided on Swift 3d. Here are the highlights after I gave it a test drive...

This thing is sooo smokin’! Download the video and see all the awesome new features, including:

• Saffron, a new type-rendering engine
  
• Dramatic performance improvements (a sluggish calendar app jumps from 14fps to 125fps)
  
• Realtime bitmap effects (blur, dropshadow, colour matrix etc)
  
• Realtime video alpha channel
  

You can view the video here. You’ll need Windows Media Player for Mac if you have a Mac.

If you are a self-taught Flash designer like me, you have probably struggled to take your designs to the next level by using actionscript. If you don’t speak the actionscript language fluently (or at all), you can pretty much forget about designing those beautifully smooth Flash sites that you see getting all the recognition. The move from tweening your objects along a timeline to animating with code is difficult - but the benefits are worth the effort. If only there was a way to simplify the actionscript syntax. Well, actually there is. It is called Fuse.

The Fuse kit is a Flash extention that makes code-based tweening easier if not down right simple. Even if you are already an experienced Flash developer, Fuse is worth looking at because it provides a solid, coherent syntax for boiling down masses of tween calls into something that is tidy, class-friendly, and Object-oriented. It was created by Moses Gunesch and is available for free by sending a request by email to fuse (at) mosessupposes (dot) com. Instructions, examples, and documentation are available at www.mosessupposes.com/Fuse/. Moses is also a nice guy who was very helpful by email. In fact, he even shared his notes from his presentation at FlashForward with me!

It only took me an afternoon to figure out what I was doing to the point where I could build something fairly complex. From my experience, this has been the easiest way to improve my Flash skills without a major investment of time or money. So if you are ready to make the jump to animating with actionscript, go get Fuse and start designing something cool!