Here’s a quandry. How many supplier-certified parts and assemblies do you need to make your 3D viewing experience via the web worth it? What if you could not only view those models, but integrate them into your design, right in the browser? That’s the next step Sunglass.io has taken, teaming up with CADENAS parts management supplier to deliver the 3d part files to your Sunglass project environment. Sunglass.io announced the partnership and launched the Sunglass.io Library today that touts over 400 manufacturers and their many parts.
Sunglass 3D Part Library
The site allows you to search for parts from the library page without being logged in, but with their last update where they integrated project pages with the collaboration platform, they’ve allowed for the parts to be searched from within a project and added to the project stage. The 1,000,000+ parts are accessible from the sidebar, where users can browse or search for components by name or part number. Images below show both the supplier list when the library is first opened from the sidebar within a project and the information you see when a part is selected. The configuration options vary depending by manufacturer and can be selected prior to (but not after) inserting. If you’re wondering, yes, the models can also be downloaded. An .stl version of the file is available with each part and version.
This is a great implementation that will truly be useful when stock parts need to be inserted into a model for collaboration. It’s slightly separated from the modeling process, but certainly provides a preview to the direction of the platform that continues to implement functionality you need throughout the design process. With that, we’d like to see Sunglass fine-tune the user interface, make it a little easier to work with the models in the environment, as well as develop some geometry editing ability as well.
