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I'm working on a project where someone else is creating a 3D model in Rhino and exporting a movie file of some animations. The video plays in the browser, then I'm replacing the video with a svg and making that interactive (mouseover, highlights, etc).

I want to make to streamline this. I know we can play with 3D objects in javascript. Do you have any pointers about this in general and specifically how to go from a Rhino 3D rendering to something manipulatable in javascript? I'm kind of a n00b at 3D but a true believer in js and the browser!

Michelle
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The fastest way to start experimenting, might be to get a free eval of Rhino from http://www.rhino3d.com/download, save the Rhino models you want to work with in a format that is generally compatible with browsers, like VRML, and work with the 3D information in that format. Rhino supports lots of mesh export file formats including VRML.

If you know how to write .NET code and call a .NET library from javascript, then you might be interested in the opennurbs toolkit that is available from http://opennurbs.org/ The opennurbs libraries (.NET or C++) will read and write Rhino .3dm models. This is a daunting task. You will need to find a way to set up a host that will run the .NET code in a way you can call it from a browser query, be able to access the Rhino model .3dm file on that host, and use java script to send queries to the host and get something usable in return that you can work with in the local browser.

-- Dale Lear (Rhinoceros development team)

Dale Lear
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Here are some thoughts from a classmate of mine: So three.js is where you want to start: http://threejs.org/ Download the library and check out all of the 3D model examples. Once you get the hang of that you can export from rhino and get it imported in webGL. The simpliest model format to work with is Collada. Rhino doesn't export this, but Maya does. I'd play around with the best workflow to get from rhino to webgl.

Michelle
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