Interactive 3D in a browser

[Ky Lane]

Hi guys,

Got a mate of mine who's asked me to do a favor for him. He's built a load of mountain bike trails at a property, and wants me to build the terrain from GIS data and satellite imagery, and overlay the GPS paths for the trails. This part is easy...

He's asked me for the viability of then having that model in an interactive environment on their website. I had a play with Cult3D when it first came out, and it was kinda cool - but how would you guys handle it? Any recommendations/suggestions appreciated.

[Stan Zaslavsky]

dont know if this would help - but check out Adobe Director - they have a pretty cool interactive 3D motorbike web game all built on that software - i saw that a little while ago and thought it was pretty neat.

[Fredrik Simu]

For online 3d, check out unity3d or why not turntool. (turntool engine is quite easy to get started with)

[Abhijoy Das]

Even you try with FPS CREATOR. Though its a game development software but still i think it will help you. The quality is quite good.

[Dave Buchhofer]

why not just do the google earth plugin? I can't seem to find the link now, but there is a very nice website out there with a similar thing, that displays the steepness and trail maps for all of the continental us ski areas.

edit: found it: http://3dskimaps.com/

[Dave Buchhofer]

on the plus side, its all free, but on the downside, there is a bit of a learning curve to do fancy stuff with the KML's, but you can probably do fine laying it out in the normal google earth and then looking up the KML in the web kit on their forums.

[Eddie Leon]

You might also consider Papervision3D. It works within Flash so it does not need a special download. You can get more info here:

http://blog.papervision3d.org/