mild obsession itch about getting away from program installations and tedious upgrades to create and manage 3D online.
Wild Pockets is on the field with a OpenGL web app claiming “create whatever 3D you can imagine.” It would certainly see that way. They’re bringing 3D online, but they’re also not the only one’s after that market.
Check it out.
WildPockets Interface
After you sign up for Beta, you can go straight into the builder and play around with some preset objects. A lot of fun, especially messing with properties that control gravity, lighting and scale. fun, neat to play with but where do you actually develop the 3D content?
When you take a closer look, you find you’ll actually need to create those model in Maya or 3Ds Max first, then import them into WIldPockets with an Exporter plugin available for each.
Even though that sidesteps the fundamental problem of developing 3D in an online environment, it doesn’t keep you from being able to bring in other people’s 3D models. The marketplace, with many free models (at the moment), can be used to create some interactive 3D, learn some scripting and maybe increase your interest in learning about online game development.
Here’s an interactive example: (you’ll need the WildPockets plugin to view)
WildPockets uses various modules (scripts) that you can apply directly to your model in ‘the builder’. Script that modify the models properties and how a user is able to interact with the objects added. Scripts to apply to objects include:
- GUI
- Camera/Avatar
- Collision
- Forces and Velocities
- Animated characters
- Sound
- Classes
- Imports
- Paths
- Timer and Coroutines
After you look through all of this stuff it’s pretty obvious it’s targeted at online game development, but like in the example above, there’s way more possibilities than creating interesting variations of minesweeper games. (see below)
Other 3D Online – Aviary
In development by the team that has brought about a incredible set of image-editing, vector art and other graphic tools, is an online Flash-Player based 3D modeler called Humingbird. Aviary doesn’t disappoint with their other tools, so this is definitely one to watch. Perhaps so 3D CAD people from a certain company can contact them to discuss things… or maybe they already have.
There’s obviously more companies interested in this whole 3D web experience market. Whose gonna be the first mashing and pushing CAD data through all these web pipes?
