I have a technical puzzle I’m trying to solve.

I have a sphere with the outside material transparent so you can see ‘into’ it. What I want to do is put a rectangular mask in front of this sphere to serve as a ‘window’ or ‘mask’ into the sphere. When we move the camera through the window / mask we can enter the spherical environment.

How would I create this masking effect? Would they be individual viewports or another 3D object (plane) acting as a mask, etc? Ideally I would want to have many spheres (dozens), each with its own window / mask. This would allow the rectangular ‘windows’ to be set side-by-side in a more space friendly way without the entire sphere body being seen.

Thoughts?

It sounds like what you really want is a custom sphere model where you cut out a section shaped based on an intersecting cube. I would advise you to create such a model in a modeling tool (e.g. Blender) and import it into Away3D.