I’d come across the AS3Dmod from Bartek on everydayflash.com a few years ago (http://www.everyday3d.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/03/as3dmod/) but never had a chance to really use it. We always look for the most cost effective way of doing things for our clients and though using 3D was offered and sometimes implemented, modifiers were never what the client was looking for. Therefore, as an experiment I made a 3D book using Away3D (my personal preference in 3D engine).
I wanted it to be flexible - so made it xml driven, interactive - so made use of the movie material class, and have the capability to have full spread pages. Originally, I did this in Flash Player 9 as some of our clients had requested this in the past. But this resulted in some jagged textures, unless turning up segments a bit too high to be efficient. To improve performance I’d thought about using Away3D Lite, but the movie materials aren’t interactive so I decided against this. Away3D in Flash Player 10 seemed the best way to go. But with the new version of Away3D, the AS3Dmod Away3D plugin no longer worked. This meant I would have to create my own version of the plugin for use with the latest Away3D build.
I used FlashDevelop (http://www.flashdevelop.org/), which if you don’t use I highly recommend, and took inspiration from similar work done on brunoimbrizi.com (http://brunoimbrizi.com/unbox/2010/07/as3dmod-away3dlite/). I created the plugin for Away3D version 3. You can download the folder to put in your plugins directory here if you’d like to use it. This worked beautifully allowing the bend and interactivity I was looking for at a good pace.
You can view a preview here. You can rotate round with the arrow buttons, drag by holding d and zoom with + and -. It's not bug free but still works well.
Tags: AS3Dmod, Away, book, Flash, page, turn, 3D