There isn’t much that can make you go ‘ooh’ quite like 3D. It opens a wide variety of options on the web particularly in e-commerce. Being able to have 3D models of your products, embedded in your web pages, would certainly make your customers happy in a lot of cases. Flash gives you the option of doing this easily, using 3D engines like Away3D to import objects at runtime, it might struggle with high detail models, but for most it does great.
I decided to make a model in Blender, a free 3D content creation suite available here...
I created a model of our logo and exported it as a COLLADA. I then added it to my xml file along with initial rotation, scale, material and offset. You can add several items to the file so you can make a scene of multiple models if you wanted. The rest is handled by my Flash movie. I used the mouse to control zoom and rotation, using click and drag by changing the 3D coordinates of the scene’s camera (who said you’d never use trigonometry?) and pointing at the centre point of the movie.
The resulting movie has great possibilities for future use.
You can view a preview here
Tags: Away, Blender, Collada, Flash, 3d