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First off, I have very little experience with 3d modeling, so this may be a poorly worded question. If that is the case, then I apologize.

Essentially, I have a large database of COLLADA format 3d models that need to be displayed in a gallery on a website. The number of models is on the order of thousands, so it would be preferable for any type of display format to be automated.

My initial thought was to display these files in 3d using WebGL. However, the lack of support from Internet Explorer is, unfortunately, a deal breaker.

Also, any other Javascript API for 3d model display would probably not be feasible as far as loading time goes, given that these do not involve any sort of hardware acceleration.

My next best option would be to have multiple 2d images of the models taken from various angles. However, with the number of models in this database, it would be nearly impossible to manually output 2d images of each model.

So, my question, then, is this: are there any tools that can be used to auto-generate images from a large set of 3d models? Or, even better yet, is there a way that these images can be rendered directly from the model to be displayed in the browser without an excessive amount of load time?

Thank you so much!

MTurcotte
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You could use meshtool to generate 2D screenshots from 3D models, either on the command line or from the Python API.

Here's an example from the command line of saving a single screenshot:

meshtool --load_collada file.dae --save_screenshots ss.png

There's also a command to take more than one screenshot, rotating around the model:

meshtool --load_collada file.dae --save_rotate_screenshots ss 10 800 600

This would save 10 screenshots of size 800x600 to files named ss.1.png, ss.2.png, etc. You can also use the Python API of meshtool to do any custom export you want. It uses Panda3D under the hood, which is very easy to use.

jterrace
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