{"id":5014,"date":"2012-08-21T22:29:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T20:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=5014"},"modified":"2019-05-16T19:05:13","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T17:05:13","slug":"sketchfab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2012\/08\/sketchfab\/","title":{"rendered":"Sketchfab, the "YouTube of 3D content", goes Pro"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Ever wondered how 3D artists showcase their work on the web? Screenshots and videos. Not cool\u2026 If it’s in 3D, I want to interact with the stuff! Sketchfab<\/a> is changing things and it is becoming a major platform for publishing and consuming this new kind of media on the internet. See \u2014 and play with \u2014 their viewer embedded below:
\nYou’ll notice that, if you have a modern browser, this works out of the box (ok, there’s a trick for IE, you’ll just need a couple of clicks to install\u00a0Google Chrome Frame<\/a>).\u00a0Sketchfab makes it easy to share 3D models on the web by embedding their viewer on any web page, which brings good traffic to the platform. It’s just like YouTube, but for 3D files. Models of\u00a0futuristic cars are always popular, such as the\u00a0BMW i8<\/a>\u00a0that was retweeted to the @bmwi<\/a> 140,000 followers.<\/p>\n

The business<\/h1>\n

There’s more to Sketchfab than geeky entertainment, as I suggested when opening the article: it is actually useful for 3D professionals to showcase their work.\u00a0You can think of Sketchfab as the equivalent of Vimeo or Soundcloud in the 3D industry. But actually, a better analogy may be with\u00a0SlideShare, because of the fact that the media is relatively rare on the internet, it is mostly produced by professionals, but it can be consumed by all.\u00a0Since their launch in march, Sketchfab have been regularly contacted for a pro version, by various user types: 3D artists, designers, scanners, and for education.
\nLast week’s release brings the features they requested:\u00a0more space, an unbranded viewer and password protection. In the future, pro accounts will also have versioning and the ability to annotate models within the viewer. Pricing\u00a0was determined after\u00a0polling early adopters and analysing average prices for similar services in other industries: it\u00a0is set at\u00a09\u20ac per month or 89\u20ac per year. The team estimates the market to 20 million active 3D software users.\u00a0A free version of the service still exists.<\/p>\n

No knowledge of 3D? No problem.<\/h1>\n

With 3D scanning becoming available to the masses, even you and me will be creating 3D content soon.\u00a0Manctl<\/a>, another French startup, is building a\u00a03D scanner in the form of a piece of software called Skanect that works in conjunction with a Kinect:
\nhttp:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9URIR-dEWBM<\/a>
\nIf you head over to their\u00a0blog<\/a>, you’ll see that they are big fans of the Sketchfab viewer. Here’s an example of what you can get if you scan yourself…<\/p>\n

The technology<\/h1>\n

Sketchfab just works because it only uses standards that are built in modern browsers (HTML5 and WebGL for real-time 3D in the browser). There are alternatives for viewing 3D content on the web, such as Unity<\/a> or Flash’s Stage3D<\/a>, but they all require a plugin instal.\u00a0The main downside is that WebGL isn’t activated yet on mobile Safari on iOS \u2014 but you can hack your iDevice to make it work. Things may change with iOS 6, but in any case the Sketchfab team is working on a fall-back version of their player in order to ensure compatibility with as many devices as possible.
\nIf you are familiar with 3D on the web, you have probably come across WebGL\/JavaScript frameworks such as Three.js, a “lightweight 3D library with a very low level of complexity \u2014 in other words, for dummies”, whose creator Mr Doob<\/a> will be at the DotJS<\/a> conference on 30 November in Paris. C\u00e9dric Pinson, the co-founder and CTO of Sketchfab, created an alternative WebGL framework called\u00a0OSG.JS<\/a>,\u00a0on which the Sketchfab viewer is based. Compared to other frameworks, OSG.JS allows lower-level programming (control over WebGL buffers for instance). It is a JavaScript port of OpenSceneGraph<\/a>, an open source project that C\u00e9dric also maintains.
\nIt is worth noting that Sketchfab is the first platform of its kind. Bringing 3D to a wide audience is an ambitious goal where they differentiate themselves from competitors P3D<\/a> and Verold<\/a>. It also comes with serious technical challenges: similarly to video, the published content needs to be compressed into different versions so it can adapt to the performance of your machine. Polygons are the building blocks of 3D models, and the more polygons, the higher the performance footprint.\u00a0The infrastructure must be able to process all the models that are uploaded to the platform as fast as possible, in order to create different versions of them with reduced numbers of polygons.\u00a0And this is a completely novel problem to deal with.<\/p>\n

The team<\/h1>\n

Sketchfab was founded by\u00a0C\u00e9dric Pinson<\/a>\u00a0and Alban Denoyel<\/a>.\u00a0They are\u00a0mentored by\u00a0Andrew Lacy<\/a>\u00a0(co-founder of Tapulous) at Le Camping<\/a>, where\u00a0they are incubated (and which is also home to their 2 interns in web dev and 3D dev\/modeling). C\u00e9dric\u00a0has 12 years of experience working as a 3D developer, he\u00a0was one of the first to jump on the WebGL bandwagon and he was commissioned by Mozilla to make a\u00a0demo of WebGL for\u00a0the launch of Firefox 4 in March 2011. Alban is an Essec Business School graduate who worked for 3 years\u00a0with the former director of Paris Match\u00a0on the launch a new media dedicated to photojournalism, and then launched a low cost web agency. He is a hobbyist sculptor who fell in love with 3D as, he felt, the “symbiosis of tech and sculpture”.<\/p>\n

How about using Sketchfab for your company?<\/h1>\n

You could differentiate from competitors by showing your products in 3D on your website! Here are two examples:<\/p>\n