Canvas 3d JS Library

Last week I posted our 0.5 release of our library. I’m very excited as I’m now seeing a lot of all our little efforts finally taking hold in a real way. Other developments recently have also shown where our library will go in the future and the features we intend to add.

To start, here are the features you will find in the 0.5 release of our library:

• Support for text. Done by applying a 2D canvas as a texture to the model
• Texture/model support in both contexts
• many bug fixes and memory usage improvement issues

What all this comes down to is that our library is becoming more and more stable. We are resolving a lot of the technical issues (such as memory usage) and we are adding some very interesting effects and features.

Just before releasing 0.5 of our library we got a chance to meet up with Vlad. Vlad was showing us some of his demos and he had done involving 2D canvas, video, audio, css etc. A lot of it showed demos with a mix of these features. Vlad also showed a few examples he had done with canvas 3D. One in particular had caught our eye. It was a simple model viewer that loaded a Collada file. We did not want to have our own model format for our project. At the time we were worried about the performance of parsing and loading such a file. One of the early demos that loaded kmz files for example took quite a bit of time to load. However, this demo showed how quick it was to load a model from such a format. In our next release we hope to have support for loading models from collada files. This is a pretty big step forward and there are certainly issues that need to be worked out. However, it is an important step and will go a long way into making our library accessible.