Please note: there seems to be a bug with Flash player in Firefox 3 that messes up the degree of rotation - please try viewing this page in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer until we can fix it

New features:

  • rendering up to 100,000 polygons (after reduction) - the time to render a change of rotation/zoom went up to 1/2 a second for the largest models as a result (normal mapping should fix this)
  • shading - Gouraud or flat shading available
  • displaying lines - only those that are likely to be visible (based on length)
  • optional texture atlas (decreases time to load, as only single texture), texture compression, & faster loading of textures
  • more SketchUp-like orbiting function
  • reductions with guaranteed quality using error measurements

To do:

  • normal mapping to increase the frame rate, without sacrificing any detail (need to automatically select seams for unwrapping)
  • correct z-sorting with BSP trees (need to decrease # of polygons split)

The Demos:

the "classic" car from the Mountain View demo (3dwarehouse page)

another popular model: Pixar's WALL*E (it's facing backwards, so rotate it around; 3dwarehouse page)

the largest model we could find on the warehouse: 50 MB COLLADA, ~440,000 polygons, and textures (3dwarehouse page)

the value proposition compared to Autodesk's Freewheel, Dassault's 3dvia, Google's Lively, or others:

1) no plugin to download for ~99% of people out there, it just works; no delays and costly servers to keep running for server-side rendering; easy to embed and send traffic back

2) built specifically for viewing and interacting with 3D models - not maps or virtual worlds

3) built to be low-cost and scalable: all open-source, Linux-based architecture with C++, Python, and ActionScript code