About Web3D

Of course, one has to understand that choosing a technology can block a project total development, because each one has it’s owns qualities and defects. Constraints as the 3D projection window size, texture number and textures size or polygon number are parameters that help choose a format, but it’s important to understand that in order to create a 3D real time model you’ll need software for modelling, texturing and animation as well as a 3D real time editor, what can become easily expensive if you want to buy all the licenses. Money issues are so important that a beginner can easily loose motivation. Fortunately we have Open Source.
Blender, as 3D editing software is without any doubt the best alternative one can find. Is so complete and versatile that after having using it for some years I wouldn’t be able to go back to 3DS max, a software that I use for more than 10 years. But the idea it’s not to compare softwares, each one has it’s one qualities and defects and for Blender as a start, the relation quality vs. price has no equal.
Once software problem is solved, we need to find a solution to export our model to a 3D Real Time format and for the web, because no software proposes this natively. The only software that offers 3D real Time editing natively is Blender, it’s a pity it doesn’t exports directly to Web 3D.
To export our model we have a new choice, that will seriously  constraint our project. After testing different things, like Shockwave 3D, some beta plugins for Blender like Softlime, a friendly advise lend me to Wirefusion. It’s true it is a proprietary software but what’s remarkable, it’s the free license they propose to upload, a license that doesn’t have all the professional functions active. It’s this free version, you can download at Demicron, I have use to create some of the projections you’ll find on this website. If I choose Wirefusion it’s because it proposes a GUI that makes me work faster and because it can support a high number of polygons for the 3D scene. But not everything is good in Wirefusion, because many options are blocked in the free license and the size of the projection window will play a big part on the 3D scene fluidity, the bigger the size is and the smaller will be the FPS. A technology as Papervision won’t be less fluid because of the window size, it supports full screen, but you’ll have to code all actions so you’ll go slowly on production and there are important constraints regarding the number of polygons, texture number and size of your scene.
Today a new choice is at hand, it’s the project O3D that aims to propose a standard format for the chaotic 3D web world. The reasons that make this format so promising are many and without entering on technical details, i have to say that polygon number, texture size and number limitations go far beyond all the technologies I have tested. And all this promises don’t stop there because multi-window function that aloud to open many 3D projection windows simultaneously or the full screen are available too. O3D has without any doubt the highest performance among free 3D real time software for 3D web. The only inconvenience, that can be seen more like a challenge to the one who is creating, is that there is no GUI at the moment so you’ll have to code all by yourself. But don’t worry because even dough there are many complicated things in O3D, there is a newly formed community around and people who participates are really open to answer your questions. If you are interested to learn how to use O3D in couple with Blender here you have some links with infos and tutorials.

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