Thanks for your time. I've been on the api pages including http://www.away3d.com/livedocs/away3d/loaders/data/MaterialData.html trying half a dozen different loaders, flash.display.Loader, away3d.loaders.data.MaterialData, etc., and looking at over 9000 tutorials trying to intuit how it's done, but I didn't come up with anything specific to native as3 object jpgs (or other formats) applied directly to polygons, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to load one of these materials (or swfs) into away3d in this way.
Ideally, I would like to do both external images and reflected data streams (such as youtube) which may or may not be possible. But for now, I'd be happy with simple jpg importing. Appreciate any help.
