Hello all!
Need advice.  I am an extreme newbie with 3d in flash and away3d & builder.  I have away3d and away builder installed, but need help in getting the away builder model into flash.  I think I have the sdk installed correctly.  Are there any examples of setup from ground zero?  I guess I am talking about everything from making sure the right air sdk is overlaid, the right version of away3d is being loaded etc.  I have found a lot of tutorials and examples of importing different models types but none in the awd format.  Also, I realize that a lot of the old tutorials and examples are old versions of away and from what I hear a lot has change in the new release.  Also, do you recommend working in Flash directly or another program such as Flash Builder?  Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
Dan

Hi Drbii and welcome to the community :O)

The best way to start is to download the examples at
https://github.com/away3d/away3d-examples-fp11

This way you know you’re at least starting with a working example when you’re setting up your programming environment, and they do give an insight into many of the tasks you are likely to want, if be it in a way that presumes a certain amount of knowledge of ActionScript and the fundamentals of 3D. (i.e. they are NOT step by step tutorials!)
Hopefully you already found the tutorials on this very site?
http://away3d.com/tutorials/
They include a link to setting up your environment for Away3D in FlashBuilder.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/creating-games-away3d.html by Away3D team member Richard Olsson.

You are right to steer clear of any tutorials not concerned with version 4.0 or higher, as there were massive changes from 3.6.

Whichever environment you use is a very personal choice.
I myself use FlashDevelop, which sets up the latest SDK when you install it. And it’s free, which was probably my reason for choosing it in the first place. If you come from Eclipse based programming then FlashBuilder will be more familiar.
I still use Flash IDE for creating graphical assets. These can be exported as a SWC and then used as Classes in your projects. 

I should also mention Flash Scout for debugging. It’s quite brilliant, the best thing to happen to Flash since GPU acceleration :O)

Good Luck!

UPDATE: there’s also these, set up for FlashDevelop.
http://away3d.com/forum/viewthread/1250/

Thanks theMightyAtom! 
I’ve been downloading some of the examples, but for instance the I ran thru the example that Richard Olsson has of the vase and I only get a white stage.  I also started editing the example that had the soldier ant in it.  I just wanted to replace that model with an awd model that I created in Away Builder.  I couldn’t get it to work.  Just had the ground plane and my model would not show up.

I’ll keep playing!  Thanks for the info!