New way to publish rich 3D content to the web, mobile and VR
Hello
We’re a start up developing 3veo, which has a free beta version online at https://watch.3veo.com/ that you can check out.
3veo connects with Unity for fast, multiplatform, socially boosted sharing of rich 3D content -- to desktop PCs, mobile and VR. 3veo can provide a variety of benefits -- for having audiences interact with 3D samples / portfolio content online, navigate environmental walkthroughs, deliver engaging entertainment experiences and more. This can be content for consumer audiences, professional communities (colleagues, clients, prospective clients) and other kinds of uses as 3veo evolves.
Posting content on 3veo for multi platform sharing is as simple as uploading a zipped Unity file to the 3veo web portal https://watch.3veo.com/.
We're looking to get an initial group of 3D artists who use Unity to check out 3veo -- to see how it can fit for your needs and provide feedback and suggestions to our team.
We’ve posted additional info online, including more details in our documentation and website https://www.3veo.com/. This includes a quick three step guide for getting an initial test file online in ~5 minutes.
We've also posted a quick start guide video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=0zAPhIv4ZBM
Our team developed technology for LucasArts, Zynga and Telltale Games prior to 3veo, so we’ve worked closely with interactive creatives and artists like you for many years.
We’ll be here on Polycount in the coming days and weeks and hope to hear about your thoughts, feedback and experiences with 3veo -- and checking out cool content that you post.
Note: At this stage in the 3veo Beta cycle, we're recommending Firefox for viewing 3veo content.
Thanks,Joel
for 3veo
Replies
You are not very clear at what it is that your technology does. You message here reads mostly like marketing with buzz words like "rich content", "engaging", "socially".... How is your service different from the competition like sketchfab, poly.google, verge3D, etc., what's the unique angle and why should 3D artists be excited?
What I gather from the documentation is that you are hosting the Unity Editor on your server and exporting an html5 web exports of uploaded unity projects. That html5 export you then package into your content website with a unified control interface. Or is there something else, perhaps you have some exciting technology - maybe tell us about it.
I gave a few examples a try, the bus sample loaded for about 5-8 minutes here in Sydney Australia. I got multiple times stuck and could not 'move forward' even though when reloading the page again sometimes I would be able to move further.
It is not at all clear on your website or the demo's what I am supposed to do as a user or what I can do with the controls, it doesn't help that it gets stuck.
- The load times are unacceptable. What I would personally do is limit the file sizes of projects to a certain size and maximize the site's speed. Getting to a place where the load time is not longer than 5-8 seconds.
- I love what you are selling: an interactive 3D viewer. As an Asset Store Publisher this is exactly what I am looking for as I can host my demo project here instead of my own website. Same way I do with my models on Sketchfab.
- Also work a bit on your front page. You guys are pushing the mobile section too much. I would rather see it start with the overview page so that the tech becomes clear instantly.
Anyway, those were my 2 cents.One of the challenges that has would be to create a consistent customer experience. Your solution seems to be a fly-through type viewer but that is everything I do not want in a product like this. The power I think is in creating your own demo's.
- You are not very clear at what it is that your technology does.
Sorry about that.
TL;DR - We stream Unity content (projects) that you can just ZIP, and drag and drop to upload. You can then play them to WebGL, and the 3veo apps on Android, iOS - and are in the process of updating our VR apps for Vive, Oculus, Gear VR, and Daydream. Kind of like a YouTube, but for interactive 3D/Unity content.
What's different about what we're doing is that we use Unity which allows you to put in your content whatever Unity supports, and it will just publish to the cloud, then play back on all platforms usually within a few minutes (though big projects can take a little while).
We have three ways to navigate right now:
1. Orbit (Sketchfab Style)
2. Tour (cycles through your cameras in alphabetical order)
3. Free (whatever you can put together in Unity with Timeline, Cinemachine, and PlayMaker).
As a bonus, we also support any general FBX, OBJ, or Collada models as uploads, though of course the "Free" camera mode will just have a fixed camera. We auto-detect PBR textures using the typical naming conventions as Sketchfab does.
Right now we only support PlayMaker for scripting, though we are working hard on support for arbitrary C# scripting and should have an experimental version sometime relatively soon.
- ...the bus sample loaded for about 5-8 minutes here in Sydney Australia
Hmmm... Yes, I'm not sure our CDN covers Australia. We're in beta right now and these are the kinds of issues we are trying to shake out before scaling up. I will double check to see if we cover Australia, and add it in if it's not there.
And yes we've put a couple of larger pieces of content on the front page that work well when you have higher bandwidth connections, but break (as you saw) when bandwidth is not so great.
Before the beta release, we considered what to do about this, and had a few ideas.
1. Detect bandwidth (and let the user choose) and just don't display higher resolution content.
2. Display an id similar to the 480p, 720p, 1080p on content that serves as a warning when playing back higher bandwidth content.
3. Report when content is loading slow and give the user the option of "exiting".
This is beta software, so we'd like to know what you think.
We do have a mode in our publishing system which publishes the same project with textures scaled to different resolutions to reduce bandwidth, but we have disabled it because A) it takes forever to publish - hogging our publish server resources and
- It gets stuck in some places.
This is a straight up a bug. The display should be showing a washing machine icon and message when displaying arrows for directions that are still in the process of loading. I'm sorry but we missed this because our bandwidth at our test site is actually quite good and we rarely get ahead of the streaming these days.
- It is not at all clear on your website or the demo's what I am supposed to do as a user or what I can do with the controls.
Good feedback. We originally had a "First Time User Experience" tutorial carousel that displays when you first come to our site that explains what it is, what it's for, and how the navigation arrows work. Some of our early feedback was that this tutorial was annoying and caused people to drop off before trying to play anything.
Perhaps we need to go back and revisit this, just make it much shorter, and make it show up 'after' you start playing back your first piece of content.
I agree that we should probably move larger content to perhaps an HD section where it's clear you need a good connection before playing back. Would like to hear what you think we should do.
- .. your solution seems to be a fly-through type viewer but that is everything I do not want in a product like this.
If you use the "Free" navigation mode when publishing, we let you do whatever you want.
I agree, the power is in creating your own demos. That's why we support PlayMaker, Cinemachine, and Timeline right now. As we publish more of our tutorials on our doc site, it will show you how you can take over completely the navigation and do whatever you want.
Our goal with the "Free" mode is to make it Unity - and "Just Work" the way it does in the UnityEditor. We are working on .NET script support and hope to have the ability to handle your own custom scripts soon.
- Also work a bit on your front page. You guys are pushing the mobile section too much. I would rather see it start with the overview page so that the tech becomes clear instantly.
Yes, that's great feedback. It's obvious that we're not communicating clearly enough what the range of platforms is. We'll make changes to make it clear.
I do VFX and would love an interactive scene where I can display dozens of explosions made in Unity's Shuriken.
What features can I expect to allow a user to trigger VFX???.... or should I just author things on a loop?
Just a warning though - one limitation (at least for right now) is that if you have a custom C# script for one of your particle systems, that won't show up in the 3veo published version. We're hard at work adding script support right now (we're using our own re-written version of the DotNetAnywhere interpreter for running scripts) so that won't be a permanent limitation, but it is right now.
We include PlayMaker, so whatever you can wire together with PlayMaker you can also do in 3veo. You'll need to upload with the "Free" camera mode as I mentioned above, so that you're Timeline, PlayMaker scripts can take over the camera (vs, tour or orbits).
We also include a few PlayMaker plugins, including the Unity UI plugin so that you can use that to add a scriptable UI for your clip.
Carlo will be doing a tutorial on PlayMaker scripting shortly, and I'll see if he can't add a tutorial on how to wire up an interactive demo like what you probably need, including a little bit of UI (maybe a menu).
- Author your VFX to fire in a loop. You can use an animation track, or possibly an auto-play timeline track to do that.
- Make cameras for each effect, make sure they're in alphabetical order in the order you want to see them in.
- Upload the project as a "Tour", which means you can click to cycle through the cameras.
Hi again
Posting a few updates on 3veo:
1) The team has implemented a number of improvements to 3veo tech, including notable load time and performance improvements which you can check out at https://watch.3veo.com
2) Active content creators that post to 3veo during this free beta phase will be eligible for 3veo’s rewards program / prizes
We’ll look forward to having more of you check it out. If you’re new to this thread, please start at the top of these posts for a quick recap
The team’s online on these forums to help address thoughts / feedback / questions you all have!
Thanks,
- Joel