In this effect, we present a 3D image gallery in Flash CS4 in which the menu of thumbnails is spinning in 3D. The tiles spin asynchonously creating a nice effect. At each spin, a different set of images is revealed on the reverse of each tile. The code can be easily modified to create any kind of 3D spinning menu.
Download
- Download the files corresponding to the gallery: spingallery.zip
In the package, you will find the spingallery.fla, SpinnerMenu.as, ImageLoader.as, and all the image files. Much of the code is commented with instructions for customization.
The spinning 3D effect is created using the new methods of ActionScript 3 available in Flash Player 10. As you will see from the code, a custom SpinnerMenu AS3 class is at the heart of the applet. We describe public methods and properties of the class on the next page.
For loading thumbnails, we use our ImageLoader class. This part is optional; you can store thumbnails in the Library rather than load them at runtime. You will find the description of the ImageLoader class in one of our earlier tutorials: 'A 3D Menu on a Cube with Perspective, Custom Bitmap Tramsformations in AS3'.
The images in the gallery are courtesy of NASA: NASA multimedia collection.
