Display designs of Rhino and Solidworks by WebGL

It is a new application based on WebGL. Designs of Rhino and Solidworks can be viewed on Chrome and Firefox by WebGL in the website of http://www.publishyourdesign.com not directly. The site has been opened to the public since early April this year. I am one of the two co-founders, and it is the work of our off time project.

Up to now, the designs from both Solidworks and Rhino are supported, and we want it to support designs from other 3D CAD say Inventor of Autodesk in the near future. We recognize the necessity of protecting IP of any designs. So, instead of accepting Rhino’s 3dm or Solidworks designs directly, we only accept an intermediate file format, *.pyd file, which describes the shapes only of designs by NURBS. We provide two converters for Rhino–>pyd and Solidworks–>pyd respectively.

In Technology, the pyd files are rendered on both Firefox and Chrome by the great WebGL. Besides that, by reading NURBS, the faceting happens in the browser side as well. Faceting is heavy and in order not to freeze the browser while faceting, the HTML5 web workers is utilized. More, it is fancy that we provide different level of details (LOD) for displaying a model in the process of zooming by giving different tolerances for facet according to the size of the models in the screen.

Have a try by visiting http://www.publishyourdesign.com. And you can get the demos by visiting our help page http://www.publishyourdesign.com/help.

Some screenshots are as follows: