Hi everyone,
Long time Rhino user here.
I wanted a way to quickly preview my .3dm files (and client feedback) directly from Google Drive without having to download them or open Rhino just to check a layer or a dimension.
I couldn’t find a clean solution that respected privacy (I didn’t want to upload client IP to a public cloud server), so I built a lightweight viewer using the Drive API and WebGL.
What it does:
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Renders Rhino (.3dm), STEP, and Mesh files directly in the browser.
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Runs client-side (files are streamed from your Drive to your browser memory, not my server).
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Supports simple point-to-point measurement and comments.
It’s currently in Free Public Beta.
I’m looking for feedback from “Power Users” on how it handles complex meshes vs NURBS. If you have any heavy files you’d like to stress-test it with, let me know how it holds up.
Link: https://3dviewer.co
Cheers Hugo
6 Likes
I tried it out quick. Lots of positives. It gets a lot of the harder texture mapping right - my floors and tiles that I had to texture map individually. Based on your development stage I think you’ll be able to achieve a similar looking model to Speckle (nothing wrong with that!!). Speckle isn’t able to import textures from Rhino quite yet so the fact that it works to some degree is quite special.
Note that I loaded an online viewer’s worst nightmare of a file - it’s part of a house. Your viewer might (most likely) work fantastic for product design and smaller objects (I’ve tried a few more while writing this).
Some potential improvements:
- Navigation - just in general needs improvement. It seems to stall after a certain amount of zooming. There needs to be a way to zoom in centered on specific objects (like most viewers provide). This might be way better with smaller models though.
- Some easy way to de-select an object - I like that objects become partially see-through when you click them. I don’t really know how to unselect them.
- Textures - This one is hard but I’m having issues with textures in certain situations. I could upload a bunch of stuff for you to play with. It would take a lot of time to break down the issues. I have a feeling this is a work in progress. Even expensive Render engines with entire developer teams are struggling with textures and mapping from one program to another.
- One specific texture issue I’m seeing is that displacement gets factored. This might be a units issue as most my drawings are in inches (maybe I can convert and try mm if I have time).
This is already really really good for just one person. Amazing!!
I tried one more file while writing this and the textures came in perfectly (well almost - pillow textures are scaled)
