Away3D is another 3D engine for Flash. It was derived from Papervision3D and brought new features which were not present in Papervision. Later the engine was rewritten so now it's a different engine but with similar architecture to Papervision.
Later Away3D got so advanced that some unique features from it were implemented in Papervision3D.
Panosalado is a free software based on PaperVision3D which makes it possible to display virtual panoramas of cities, events, landscapes, etc.
FIVe3D is a vector based 3D engine. It means it does better job when rendering text than e.g. Papervision which is bitmap based.
Zack Jordan who is obviously a fan of FIVe3D prepared a nice tutorial how to create a TextCloud with FIVe3D.
Sometimes you need just a simple 3D animation and using the Papervision engine would be overhead.
In this case I do recommend taking a look on this light weighted but powerful engine, which makes displaying and manipulating objects in 3D easy.
AS2 version of this engine is also available.
Sandy has been here before Papervision, which is very popular now. However Sany regained momentum and relesaed it's AS3 version.
Now, the Sandy 3D engine comes also with lots of tutorial which help you to start using it.
PaperVision 3D is gaining popularity. Lee Brimelow provided on his blog a 3D Carousel Example based on this 3D engine.
Fla is Adobe Flash CS3 only
Papervision is a popular 3D engine which is both easy to use and powerful.
It has a strong community of fans and developers. You can use AS2 or AS3 version. Recently Papervision3D can be downloaded and installed also as a Flash Components.
There are also another 3D actionscript engines, but this is the one you should start (and probably end) with.
