New and truly revolutionary versions of Flash Player and Adobe AIR named “Incubator” (formerly Molehill APIs) were made available on Adobe Labs. To those who are unfamiliar with the new release, it features hardware accelerated 3D graphics support.

As Adobe puts it: “The Adobe® AIR® and Adobe Flash® Player Incubator is a technology preview program for more adventurous developers who are willing to experiment with Flash Platform runtime features that are in early development stages.”

New Incubator builds of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR available here:
Download Incubator Builds and check Wiki

If you are keen on exploring 3D capabilities right away, you can use one of the pre-release versions of the popular 3D frameworks that also announced Incubator support. To see a list of all features that are included in the Incubator builds, check out this post.

3D frameworks supporting Molehill:

• Away3D 4.0 Alpha
• Flare3D 2.0
• Aerys Minko
• Sophie 3D
• CopperCube 2.5
• Zest3D
• Alternativa 8 (available soon)

Here are some LIVE demos:

(make sure you have Flash Player Incubator installed first)

Added on March 9:

• Grid Map Generator
• AGAL Demo (cool shape morph)
• Snowboard Demo
• DeltaStrike
• Fractal Tree Generator
• Simple Game Physics Example (M2D)

Added on March 8:

• Flickr Coverflow
• Spiral Carousel
• Full Quake 3 game
• Sofa (Sophie3D)
• Fiat 500 (Sophie3D)
• Fractal Sponge
• Normal Map Shader
• Animated Creatures
• Bloom Demo
• Molecule Viewer(article + demo)

Added on Feb 27:

• Quake 3
• Zombie Tycoon
• MAX Racer Demo Alternativa 8 (150MB)
• 40k polygon terrain demo
• Shallow Water Manipulation
• Hi-res Head Model (OBJ)
• Duck Demo
• MD5 Animated Model Demo
• Environment map test
• Animation blend test
• Environment map diffuse test
• 2D performance demo: with molehill and without
• Treasure Dungeon
• How fast is molehill (article and demos)
• JigLib Physics Demos (Away 4.0) – demo1, demo2, demo3, demo4, demo5
• Plane and triangle by Ryan Speets (demo + source)
• Ambiera CopperCube Backyard Demo
• Radiolarian
• Starfish
• 500 Particles
• Away3D + JigLib
• Voxel Renderer

Videos (only new stuff):

• Tanki Online 2.0 Trailer (Molehill)
• See What Flash Can do with the Molehill 3D API

Just Source Code:

• Molehill Spinning Cube on Gist

Tutorials and Articles:

• Digging more into the Molehill APIs by Thibault Imbert
• Molehill from scratch with Adobe Flash CS5
• Simple 2D Molehill Example
• 2D Sprite Sheets with Molehill by Tinic Uro (demo + source)
• How fast is molehill (article and demos)
• Molehill 3D APIs article by SwfGeek
• Changing the web, again article by Thibault Imbert
• Using FTD and Away3D 4.0 by George Profenza
• Quickstart for Molehill and Away3D by John Lindquist
• Simple Bunnyhill Demos (article and sources)
• Per-Polygon Distance Fog tutorial by Pixelante
• Per-Vertex Distance Fog tutorial by Pixelante
• Fast Vertex Lighting tutorial by Pixelante
• Demystifying Molehill – Part 1 – good read
• Using Flash 3D API in haXe
• Converting wii game to Molehill (Video Interview With Mandreel)
• Convert C++ application to Molehill using Mandreel
• Molehill Getting Started – great article, recommended
• AGALMiniAssembler Primer
• AGAL basics

Related News:

• Unity3D announces support for publishing to Flash Player
• GameBuilder Studio announces Molehill support
• JigLib adds Away3D 4.0 (Molehill) support
• HxSL – haXe Shader Language (announcement and manual)

Now, let’s change the web!
Follow me on twitter @pauliusuza for more news and updates on #flash and #molehill

Puppet Warp tool has a lot of cool uses like character or object posing on the scene (as seen in this video), however what I found really useful is Puppet Warp’s ability to tweak the image without any visible distortion that usually occurs when using warp, scale or smudge tools. Just to give a very quick example of what I mean, I will demonstrate how you can add a nicer smile on my portrait image I took a while ago for my Facebook profile.

Disclaimer: I am no way affiliated with Adobe Systems Inc. or getting “rewarded” for this article, I was just happy to discover a feature in CS5 that I really seem to like and I want to share it with you.

Here’s the original image I took:

Let’s choose Edit -> Puppet Warp

The Puppet Warp mesh appears over non-transparent parts of the layer, in our case it covers all the portrait:

When we click on the image, yellow control points appear. Let’s position those points on (or near) the main features we want to keep in place when modifying the image – think of them as pins on a flexible garment:

When working with detailed images, you will want to increase the mesh density for more precise results and less visible distortion, this can be done by choosing an option from the Density menu:

Now let’s drag the control points to tweak the image to your liking, like so:

When done, hit Return key on the keyboard and behold the final result:

This is a comparison of the two images side by side:

And this is a close up of detail, you can clearly see that no detail or texture was lost in the process and the image still looks very natural. All of this in less than 60 seconds with the new CS5!

Amazing, isn’t it? What do you think about it? Please leave your comments in the comment section below and follow me on twitter for more fun stuff!