Consider creating 3D effects manually.
Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5 introduced a 3D engine, which allows
you to apply perspective transformation on display objects. You
can apply these transformations using the
rotationX
and
rotationY
properties
or with the
drawTriangles()
method of the Graphics
class. You can also apply depth with the
z
property.
Keep in mind that each perspective-transformed display object is
rasterized as a bitmap and therefore requires more memory.
The following figure illustrates the anti-aliasing produced by
the rasterization when using perspective transformation:
The anti-aliasing is a result
of vector content being dynamically rasterized as a bitmap. This
anti-aliasing happens when you use 3D effects in the desktop version
of AIR and Flash Player, and in AIR 2.0.1 and AIR 2.5 for mobile.
However, anti-aliasing is not applied on Flash Player for mobile
devices.
If
you can create your 3D effect manually without relying on the native
API, that can reduce memory usage. However, the new 3D features
introduced in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5 make texture mapping easier,
because of methods like
drawTriangles()
, which
handles texture mapping natively.
As a developer, decide whether the 3D effect you want to create
provides better performance if it is processed through the native
API or manually. Consider ActionScript execution and rendering performance,
as well as memory usage.
In AIR
2.0.1 and AIR 2.5 mobile applications in which you set the
renderMode
application
property to
GPU
, the GPU does the 3D transformations.
However, if the
renderMode
is
CPU
,
the CPU, not the GPU, performs the 3D transformations. In Flash
Player 10.1 applications, the CPU performs the 3D transformations.
When the CPU does the 3D transformations, consider that applying
any 3D transformation to a display object requires two bitmaps in
memory. One bitmap is for the source bitmap, and a second one is
for the perspective-transformed version. In this way, 3D transformations
work in a similar way to filters. As a result, use the 3D properties
sparingly when the CPU does the 3D transformations.
