As I promised couple of posts back, now that we have built our infrastructure we can deliver advanced modeling features on top of it. So far we supported 11 basic geometric shapes for you to add to your sketches. Today we added 26 additional shapes to that list. Let me tell you what that means with a couple of screenshots.
You can edit above two sketches here: Imperial Fighter and Cleaning Closet
As you can see, we can now build really interesting models simply by adding instances of basic geometric shapes. The basic principal of sketch design is still the same. Choose a template, fill in the variable values, arrange the generated instances to build what you want to build. Both the above sketches were created by following the same basic workflow.
The templates now include a variety of basic shapes that are typically required for 3D modeling. In addition to the primitives (Box, Cylinder, Cone, Sphere), we have added Pyramid, Pipe, Torus, Pipe bends, Spherical shells, tapered cylinders, tapered pipes and half/quarter sections thereof. These shapes are quite generic. A hollow cylinder can make a rod in the bicycle, or a can of coca cola – it is up to you to specify the desired parameters (radius, thickness, height) and generate what you need for your 3D model.
When you pick one of these shapes, fill in the variables and press the add button, a corresponding cadmium script executes on our server and returns you the mesh object to render. With ample amount of caching we try to make this process as fast as possible, so you don’t have to wait. Recent WebGL performance overhaul was made specifically to make rendering of these objects faster and smoother. It has indeed paid off.
I am very excited about the possibilities. In next few days I am going to enjoy myself making some models of my own. It was real fun to design above two models. I hope you will enjoy it too. Do let me know what you come up with.
3DTin 