It was only a couple of weeks ago when Sketchfab announced that they had put together the world’s first directory for industrial 3D scanning services – The Sketchfab Community 3D Scanning Services – yet, the crew has yet another milestone announcement to make before the close of 2015.
Starting today, users of the fully embeddable 3D viewer can now give motion to characters, illustrate educational concepts and tell better stories around product features through their all–new 3D Animation support.
According to the announcement posted to the company’s blog on Tuesday, the new feature “will support different types of animations, such as skeleton-based animation (model rigged with bones), solid animation (translation, scale, rotation), and morph targets (great for animating faces).”
Add to this the fact that each model can contain multiple animation tracks and loop modes that a viewer can switch between while viewing a model and it becomes clear just how useful the new feature will be to everybody from digital sculptors to even engineers needing to communicate complex movements or systems to clients and colleagues.
“Since the beta launch in August, over 1000 users helped us test and we’ve been blown away by the animations they published: giving motion to characters, illustrating educational concepts and product features and telling stories,” explains Sketchfab’s Natalia Krasnodebska.
Publishing an animation through the platform is easy: simply export your animation from any 3D application to an FBX file and upload it to Sketchfab. Currently, 3DS Max and Maya users can export directly from within their workspace with a free exporter plugin with support for other applications to follow.
Find out more over at Sketchfab.
