Testers needed for OurBricks Beta - uploading, viewing and sharing open 3D assets
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - 11:24
I am working on the recently launched OurBricks. We use HTML5/WebGL tech to let you upload, view and share CC Licensed 3D content right in the browser. We just launched the beta and would like to have it tested.
Uploading is pretty simple as seen in this 45 sec video
Once the content is on the site you can embed it back on your own site (or any site that allows iframes). Here are a few examples of embedding.
We support COLLADA (.dae) and OBJ and are looking into to other types of content. If you have any input on this or other aspects of the site then I'd love to hear it.
It's really a pain to program, but having (at least partial) .blend support would be awesome.
.blend support would indeed be awesome. Our hope vision is to integrate right into Blender and other major packages so you would just hit an 'Export to OurBricks' button. We have been dipping our toes.
For now the COLLADA export in the latest Blender demo is actually pretty solid and one the most well test paths into OurBricks.
I heard Blender's collada support, specifically exporting skeletal animations, is lacking.
http://forum.freegamedev.net/
From our experience that was true for 2.49 but in the most current beta the COLLADA export works quite well. They leverage OpenCOLLADA which is being actively developed so it is improving all the time.
As an additional fyi. Blender's COLLADA roadmap is map is here http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Architecture/COLLADA
Hi,
2 months ago, I started writing a .blend (2.49) file viewer in webGL. Now for my personnal use I use md5 files, so I don't think the blend loader's code will evolve a lot. Anyway it's licenced under GPL 3, so you can take some portions of code if you wish. But the code is quite dirty and poorly commented :P. The loader does not handle animations, nor is able to unpack texture files (I was close to achieve it) http://www-valoria.univ-ubs.fr/Nicolas.Bonnel/3D/loader.html
Correct link: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Architecture/COLLADA
http://forum.freegamedev.net/
@Tartos: Thank you for the heads up. I will have a look at it.
@clrg: You're right. I have edited the link above. Thx.
Indeed blender support would be awesome. But I remember the developers writing somewhere that the .blend format is really not intended for others, i.e. it is just a dump of internal structs and may change at any time. Maybe it would be possible to let the users upload a blend file, then it gets converted to collada, that collada file is used in the viewer, but the user has the possibility to download the actual blender file?
Not a bad idea actually. I have found that collada import into blender seems to leave something to be desired. Have filed a bug on it.
The COLLADA export really is quite good so that path is reasonable for now I think.
We have actually just launched experimental FBX, 3DS and DXF support so there are now more ways into the system.
Collada export is not so good. Not sure where you get your info from?
Currently it doesn't support armature (skeletal) animation. Export to .dae is missing many features in 2.49 and in 2.5x.
The good news is that it has been promoted to an official Blender feature (previously was a third party script) and is being actively worked on:
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2010/12/collada-importexport-team/
Bad news is that the latest 2.5 release (2.56a) does not support animations with COLLADA afaict:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-256-beta/
Excerpt from the release logs below, emphasis mine:
Known Issues
Although we work hard on fixing all issues, there are still some things we know already are not fixed. Please refrain from reporting these, if you find issues in Blender 2.55 Beta that are on this list.
http://forum.freegamedev.net/
We have made a ton of updates since I last posted about OurBricks. Please check out this 2 min. Youtube video for an overview. We have started to get some nice content up so have at it.