How Can I Use Sketchfab Viewer API?

Sketchfab’s Alban Denoyel gave a talk on their Viewer API that lets users build web apps on top of Sketchfab’s 3D viewer.

Sketchfab’s Alban Denoyel gave a talk on their Viewer API that lets users build web apps on top of Sketchfab’s 3D viewer.

Intro

The Viewer API lets you build web apps on top of Sketchfab’s 3D viewer. With the API, you can control the viewer in JavaScript. The API exposes a lot of the functions you can find in the Sketchfab 3D editor, so that you can control them in a customized way, both in terms of behavior and user interface. You can typically do things like starting or stopping the viewer, moving the camera, changing a material color, hiding a part, moving an object, customize annotations, trigger an animation… You can get the full list of functions here. In the AUDI example, you can change interior and exterior colours, open doors, and have custom camera views. It’s very easy to integrate for any javascript developer. It doesn’t require 3D skills, only regular web skills.

Why Is It Great?

We spent 7 years working on making Sketchfab the best web-based 3D player. This means a number of things: accepting a lot of formats, loading fast, offering state-of-the-art rendering, making it easy to publish from your favorite tools, letting you edit and annotate the content… Sketchfab supports Physically based rendering, animations, positional sounds, VR, AR… We also offer a set of post-process effects helping to enhance the visual quality, with things like depth of field, sharpness, ambient occlusion… We recently introduced a feature to let you automatically add a ground shadow, either in real-time or as a baked ambient occlusion. If you look at how companies traditionally show the (physical) products they sell, it’s typically using a number of photos (sometimes made using 3D) of different angles of the product. But the product has 3D dimensions in the real world, and with technologies like WebGL, it’s now possible to publish a 3D preview which works everywhere, and have it look pretty much photorealistic. 3D is not going to replace images, but it’s a great companion, it’s interactive, so it’s pretty much the closest one can get to the actual thing. Add VR and AR, and you actually get really close.

Case Study

A perfect use case for the Sketchfab Viewer API is product configurators. It’s typically the type of thing that is too complex to be handled directly inside Sketchfab, but can easily be solved with the API. Configurators are also a perfect use case for 3D in general, as it allows an unlimited number of product configurations through options, and Sketchfab makes it possible in real-time, with immediate visual feedback for the customer. Among the industries which are a good fit for such product, there is typically furniture, automotive, footwear, jewelry. All those industries already heavily rely on 3D versions of their products, have many products and product lines, with regular updates, and many options. 3D has the double benefit of offering unmatched interactivity for the end user, and easier workflows for the brand.
Here are some examples

Alban Denoyel, Co-Founder & CEO at Sketchfab

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

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