How to make a Blender model "walk-through-able" by visitors via a web browser?

Hi eveyone,

I’ve made a model (in Blender) of an archaeological site and put a video I made of it on a website.

http://www.thisishonduras.com/Copan_Ruinas.htm#Virtual_Tour_of_Copan

I would love it if I could somehow allow visitors to the site navigate the model (i.e., “walk-through” the model) to explore the model’s details as they wish. This would have to happen via web browsers (Chrome, Explorer, Safari, etc), as most visitors to the site will not be Blender users.

Can this be done at all? Would the visitors need to download additional software to their devices to use the model? Or can the Blend file somehow be “translated” to some format that browsers can understand natively?

www.sketchfab.com has a Fps mode and a blender exporter. You can also embed and share your model on websites it uses Webgl.

You have several options, all of which are terrible:

  1. Use WebGL
    Like all modern web technology, it’s unreliable and poorly supported across browsers. You will need a newer version of Firefox or Chrome, or the very latest Internet Explorer (which most people do not have). It also requires a somewhat modern GPU. It “works” on some newer Android devices and on iOS 8. Be prepared for poor performance and graphical glitches and lots of testing.
    Technologies using WebGL include Sketchfab, P3D.in, Blend4Web and many others.

  2. Use Flash
    Flash’s hardware-accelerated Stage3D works on many GPUs and has software-fallback, but there are also (slower) software-only solutions such as Papervision 3D. Software-only Flash-based solutions are generally the slowest but most reliable. Since it’s Flash, it needs the plugin and thus won’t work on iOS.

  3. Use Unity3D
    Unity’s web plugin offers the best performance and good support even for older GPUs, since you’re not running on a crappy abstraction layer like Flash or WebGL. On the other hand, very few people have the Unity plugin already installed (compared to Flash). On Chrome, Unity can run through PNaCL without explictily installing a plugin. In the future, Unity will also publish to WebGL so you can have the worst of both worlds*, combined. There’s a free version of Unity available, but with no programming skills it’s hard to use.

  4. Use any other crappy plugin
    It only gets worse from here, just forget about it.

*) I have to leave this hilarious excerpt from “On the future of Web Publishing in Unity” here:

“To convert the .NET game code (your C# and UnityScript scripts) into JavaScript, we developed a new technology in-house which we call IL2CPP. IL2CPP takes .NET bytecode and converts it to corresponding C++ source files, which we can then compile using any C++ compiler — such as emscripten to get your scripts converted to JavaScript.”

What could possibly go wrong?

You can export to WebGl using Unreal Engine 4 as well. UE 4 offers Blueprints, which is nodebased programming/scripting. You can do a lot with it. It’s 20$/month or 19€/month, though

Hi,

I’d like to say a few words about WebGL and the web platform. We have been working with WebGL over 4 years since its infancy.

Citing from our Mozilla Hacks article:

“Broken rendering, tab crashes, security “warnings” from some big guys, unavailability in public browser builds, all sorts of fears, uncertainty and doubts.”

That was the past. Now things have changed:

“all the major browsers on all desktop and mobile systems support this open standard for rendering 3D graphics, everywhere, without any plugins.”

You can check the dynamics of WebGL support and features on the webglstats site. According to it 75% of all desktop and mobile systems connected to Internet support WebGL. internetlivestats claims there are 3 billions Internet users, and so 2.2 billions of them have 3D rendering capabilities in their browsers. That is huge number of users!

Yes, still there are problems with stability and performance. Some our customers become angry when they meet broken rendering of their (often ancient) computers. Some of them don’t have time to upgrade to iOS 8 for example and so on. The adaptation process is slow, but it is going on.

Thank you, Richard, yii7, BeerBaron, tehtoast, and UFOa!! Your comments are all very enlightening!