Online Interactive 3D Models

Screenshot%20from%202019-04-04%2009-13-55
That model is 270MB. Im not sure that we should be embedding anything like that in the discourse forum.

I think what you’re doing is cool and there is definitely a use case for what your doing but I don’t think we should be embedding anything like that in the forum. A link to the content that can be clicked on and loaded should be sufficient.

Even if it is decided to enable the viewing of a model file in the forum, there should probably be a size limit. Not everyone has a fast network or powerful computer. That 270MB model is still loading on my computer and has been for the past 10mins. Im currently at 96%. :slight_smile:

And after all that waiting, it failed :frowning:

Thanks for the feedback. Unreal has this experimental and I see in the log you used:
“Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.99 Safari/537.36”.
We need more feedback.
Regarding the speed it is now hosted on very low upload rate network, therefore I ask you people to find suitable hosting - I do not have any besides to this sandbox.

The original model didn’t load for me (chrome tab crashed), and that was smaller. In any case, building models into static sites for the various machines seems like it would make sense.

That said, using threejs to build a onebox for STLs and other supported models feels appropriate for discourse, and maybe it could be accepted into the core even.


If only you try once and use a regular computer you can see how detailed is HercuLien: this is the cause of crashes and huge volume. Normally we can simplify unnecessary things when we model.

Not sure how 16GB RAM 4 core don’t count as a normal computer. Not a ChromeOS system, just chrome on a regular computer…

I am watching it via Firefox on Asus with the below config and GTX980M
MyNotebook

Maybe the Intel graphics in my system is the difference. Perhaps it has to do more in software, so more RAM required, so the tab crashes because it runs out of memory.

I see in my Apache log files only 3 attempts to load this model, so there is no serious intent and no visitors interested in this matter. Perhaps you can go stone age threejs. I shall mention my last words in this thread:

  1. UE4 team works exponentially hard to improve

  2. Hardware improves and goes lower cost

I vote for investing on a 3D online environment enabled with conferences as you see in the Multi Author feature of 4.22

I am leaving this community for a while because have engaged with Augmented Reality projects.

@mcdanlj thanks for the comfortable “bed” - I’ll be back later.

I was looking into modifying onebox to support stl and I noticed that it has github support. The interesting thing about that is that is that github has a built in model viewer but the onebox github support seems to treat it as a text file, which I guess the stl technically is.

If you click on the link it will take you to github and show you the model which is in this case the x axis motor mount for the mendel90 printer.

So the question is, should we try to get the onebox github viewer to display the model or would a separate onebox engine specifically for model files be able to override the github engine to display links to stl files?

This almost starts to turn into a meta.discourse.org conversation! Go ahead and start it and I’m @mcdanlj there too; tag me in! :slight_smile:

I think that starting with a threejs viewer for uploaded .stl files makes the most sense to start with because it’s isolated, and then using that feature to onebox github (etc.) .stl links next. But I haven’t really gotten deep into Discourse, the bits I’ve read have been driven by answering questions for building an import script.

The more I think about it the cooler it sounds! :slight_smile:

Then, for going further, when @Eclsnowman has enough time to talk about a static site for these printers, it will make sense to ask @anon57870006 for help with incorporating the model that can be manipulated into such a site, where a large model can fit well.

I plan to open a conversation on meta.discourse.org going forward but I thought I should mention here that I modified the github_blob engine for onebox to support displaying stl files. I did this as opposed to creating a new engine for model files because it seemed simpler and I thought it would be a good starting place for someone who has never written a onebox plugin before. :slight_smile:

Currently this only exists in a local git repo running on my laptop. I’m going to create a fork of the onebox repo and ask for the developers to review my change. After some feedback and with their approval, I’ll create a pull request. Then I’ll look into creating a standalone model viewer.

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@Ralph_Schaffner That’s awesome! No big surprise that a back end developer like myself would guess wrong about the best way forward. :smile: Thanks for sharing your progress here!

@Ralph_Schaffner I’ve been working on models for HSS lathe tools and it has really made me wish that STL oneboxing worked on hobby-machinist, but they run xenforo so there’s no oneboxing there at all, let alone the possibility for your STL oneboxing to appear in an update. Can’t wait for that to land! :slight_smile:

Hopefully, we could have a cutoff of something like 5MB where anything above that will only show an image. Let’s face it though, having it set up so that STL files are represented as a GIF made up of renderings of a number of different angles would suffice quite nicely without the need for a ton more bandwidth being used.

Trying to limit the bandwidth used by generating images makes no sense because you would need to download the model file to generate the images. That would only work if the site hosting the models provides an alternative link or thumbnails that we can use.

And the plan is to have a limit on file size. I’m also planning on supporting multiple file formats since the code differences to render them is minor. I’m thinking amf,obj,stl, and gcode to start. Three.js supports quite a few.

I’m also thinking that there needs to be a user controlled setting on whether or not to render model files. I’m not sure how many it would take to bring your browser to it’s knees but I’m sure it will happen to somebody eventually.

Our site limit on file size is 40MB, regardless of image, video, or (soon, I hope) .stl

STL is an allowed file type already.

The server used by this forum is what I was suggesting would make the image files.