Serial 3D flip effect in AE

MaxAfter has posted an After Effects tutorial and project in Flip Effect, which shows you how to manually create a pattern of shapes and flip them.

An alternative might be the built-in filter Card Dance (covered by MaxAfter earlier), which only works in 8-bit/pixel mode, but is able to use AE camera and lights in the same composition. Using a Repeater operation on a Shape layer doesn't seem to offer much of an advantage here either, but for examples check out Eran Stern's More of the Same series of tutorials. For more on Card Dance see other AEP posts tagged Card Dance and Chris Zwar's Halftone effect – using Card Dance, which uses the Card Dance filter and a Shape layer with the Repeater operation.