For hobby I have a site where I sell models for cnc carving. I was looking for a way to have an online model Viewer but didn't want to go the plug-in route...figured most vistors will not download a plug-in. Tried wirefusion but could never get the open gl to work right..plus it's very pricey for a hobby. Anyways I stumbled across the 3d engines for flash player 11..very cool...hard for me to figure out but figured it out enough to create a viewer based off their online viewer. Best part FREE...lol I tried away3d, flare 3d and settled on Alternativa

http://alternativaplatform.com/en/

http://a3dplayer.com/

pretty cool way to show a model online with no plug-in..well a plug that 90% of people have. You need flash player 11 for it to play

I've heard about the 3d functionality that has been added to Flash. I'm unclear on why the Alternativa player is needed if Flash can display the 3d natively?

I have used free version of WireFusion, and the OpenGL display is not hardware accelerated in that version. To use hardware OpenGL, you need to use the paid for version. Additionally, there is a small software component that is required to use the hardware OpenGL on the user machine, and this is included when the presentation is published.

I have run into some issues with model size and/or texture map size limitations in WireFusion. Java by default limits the memory that can be used when it gets installed on the users machine. While the memory allocation can be increased on the user machine, most people don't know how to do this.

It would be nice if Flash can deal with larger models than WireFusion, even if it is Java that is producing the size limitation.

Chris

No programmer here but what I learned digging into alternativa, like flare 3d and away 3d they are just libraries to add 3d functionality and interactivity that is not in flash. I put one model online as test..works very nice...I was getting like 60fps and zero on the cpu...but I have a high end graphics card...had a friend test it with a run of the mill card and it was reading 35fps and 0-1 on the cpu...the model was 35kish for poly's with a texture map. I am trying to write my on viewer script based off what they have online...so close..got the model in there rotating...now just need to finish with the keyboard pan and zoom. You can just export from them online but the swf gets big with a lot of extra stuff..hence trying to write my own. Wire fusion was sure a lot easier to use.