ARTICLES
Streaming and sharing 3D cave scans.
I build Submerged Viewer to put full-detail scans of flooded caves, mines and wrecks in anyone's browser. These are my notes from that work: how the streaming works, how I make a scan feel like a place you explore, and how it compares with other ways of sharing a scan.
TOPIC
How it works.
What happens between a 100-million-triangle scan and a browser tab, and how to make it feel like a place.
How it works
How do you stop visitors flying through the walls of a 3D scan?
Streaming tools let you fly straight through rock. A ball rolled around the outside of the scan builds a cage that stops you at the walls and still lets you through the grate.
How it works
How can I stream a 3D model with 100,000,000 triangles?
The recipe behind the viewer: a tree of detail levels, compressed pieces fetched by byte range, and a browser that draws only what you can see.
TOPIC
Sharing a scan.
Why full detail matters, and the ways to show a cave or mine scan to the people who will never dive it.
Sharing a scan
Why 40 million triangles in a browser is a big deal
What a single cave scan weighs, why ordinary 3D viewers cannot open one, and what changes when anyone can explore it from a link.
Sharing a scan
How to share a 3D cave or mine scan
Rendered video, an Unreal app, CaveViewer or a browser link: four ways to share a cave or mine scan, compared side by side.