Toward the end of last year, the Springbox Rich Media team was tasked with building an interactive 3D view of the interior of Honda’s CrossTour model. The client wanted a Flash application that was flexible enough to handle additional vehicle models moving forward. This presented an interesting challenge because the 3D had to be interchangeable as well.

After reviewing all of their requirements, I decided to build an XML-driven Flash application that utilized the Away3D open source Flash library. The creation of the application went a lot smoother than I had expected. I had used Papervision (an alternative 3D Flash library) in the past, but I wanted to explore something different. I have to say that, after building this application, I’m a huge fan of Away3D.

The 3D engine performance is great, the documentation is very clear and the implementation of the code is very logical. The toughest part of the entire project was finding a way to plot points inside of the 3D view of the interior. After that was sorted out, it was smooth sailing. Check out the live app for yourself.

For those looking to explore other options in the 3D world of Flash, I highly recommend Away3D.