3d-eval

This is a static site to help compare two approaches to viewing 3d object files, one using OBJ files with virtex3D and the other using GLTF files created from the OBJ files and viewed in Google's model-viewer. The purpose for doing this evaluation is to see if we can stop using virtex3d since it hasn't been updated in 5 years, and is no longer supported.

The static site is served from GitHub Pages at: https://sul-dlss-labs.github.io/3d-eval/

Set Up

A report for all public 3D objects was run in Argo in October, 2023 and the resulting CSV was saved as _data/items.csv. To fetch all the files for these objects from Stacks using their published Cocina metadata you can run:

$ rake fetch

In order to convert the fetched OBJ files to GLB (binary GLTF) you can run:

$ rake convert

Finally if you want to look at the files locally you can:

$ jekyll serve

and open your browser at http://localhost:4000/3d-eval/

Publish

The site is published using GitHub pages. There are a lot of files, so it can take a bit of time to clone and push the respository, and for changes to take effect on the live site.

$ jekyll build
$ git commit -a -m "latest content"
$ git push

Then view the published site at http://sul-dlss-labs.github.io/3d-eval/

Develop

The model-viewer JavaScript library is loaded from a CDN, but if you are going to change how the virtex3d viewer works in js/virtex-viewer.js you will need to install yarn, and then:

$ yarn install
$ rake build

Otherwise changes to the jekyll site are easy to change while running:

$ jekyll serve --watch