It appears the interactive 3d Java preview is gone? I only can guess what may be the reason. But if it's 3D grabbers, would it be possible to have an automatically generated simple animated gif instead? I miss the preview as I did not care about the object orientation at time of upload
It got broke in the last update for looking at your own models and logged in, it works ok on other people's models when logged in and your own when logged out... a fix should be coming - see; https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=4213&a mp;start=0&
It is a very good idea to use it on any model that MeshMedic may have modified (e.g. for unification of overlapping meshes or correction of non-manifold problems). Sometimes MeshMedic produces undesirable results in the process. Presumably you shouldn't have to worry about this if your model is manifold and unified to begin with, although differences in precision mean that some models may pass as manifold in one application (e.g. MeshLab) and fail in another (e.g. Blender).
The 3d preview has never worked for me either. Would it be possible to run a blender script to obtain the images required to create a flash based object vr? bvr
Yes, we've looked in to that option. The biggest issue is rendering time - a simple turntable animation with a few extra viewing angles along the z-axis very quickly adds up to 200+ frames to render. It isn't completely gone from our wishlist though Bart
Sure, here's a quick test: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/150286/Shapeways/HTML_OpenGL/3DNP_lo ader.html It's slow to load, so be patient. Once the model starts turning you can drag it with your mouse. This is a simple render. It only took a few seconds to generate. Bart
Maybe one for the future, but how about WebGL as an option? I'm currently playing with it, and in fact I'm using it to generate my models on shapeways! http://gratrix.net/polyhedra/webgl/
Who knows! At the moment WebGL browser support isn't good enough yet though. For really large models (500k polygons) this may not be the best option, as you'll first have to download a *huge* 3d file. I'm guessing that displaying a prerendered movie is a lot faster? Bart
Another problem I suppose with the WebGL (or some kind of render plugin) is that it might be easy to extract the model data which may not be desirable. I do like the "it just works" of 3DNP though, and it was quick for me to load - in fact at first I did not realize it was a set of pictures.
I've already introduced a simple full color 360° GIF made from only 12 pics.. on my recent models. I've suggested that back on November last year: https://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=2104 6&#msg_21046 I can tell by the sales chart it works. It sure helps better visualize the model for customers even if it's only a rendering. example: