A few more words on 3D reviews: technical data from the creators

After our publication on 3D rendering, some readers have asked questions about the technical content of 3D reviews. Due to the fact that I did not have enough data to answer this question, I contacted the CTO of REVIEW3 Anton Egorkin and offered to publish his comments and additions to the article. Anton agreed and also suggested that people still perceive 3D product reviews like the models their company made 5 years ago. This perception causes some prejudice in relation to 3D-views. I decided to cite Anton’s text without changes, under the cut in detail about the evolution of 3D reviews over the past 5 years in the words of their creator.

It’s important for us that someone noticed the difference between 3D views and 360 photos. Meanwhile, the results of a survey (albeit not very massive), which was carried out in the article (about three-dimensional visualization), shows that most readers still perceive 3D reviews as the content that we did 5 years ago. The models took a long time to load, had low visual realism, which explained their low popularity among retailers. Over the past 5 years, we have changed almost everything in them, I will describe what has been done.

Load Acceleration – Quantitative Standard, Texture Pasting, CDN

The first thing we did was to solve the problem of speeding up loading without losing quality. To do this, we developed and implemented strict standards that limited the number of triangles and the size of textures. We knew the results from 3D scanners would not work for us. This led to the fact that the volume of textures was large and the number of triangles was huge. In addition, the scanner always adds small artifacts, and smooth surfaces become slightly “rough”. This naturally affected the download speed. After the implementation of the standard, some of the scanner’s functions were transferred to the 3D modeler, due to which we received a tangible increase in speed.

Also, the loading accelerated by our technology of “gluing” many textures into one and storing a bump map instead of a normal map. When we again faced the need to increase the loading speed of models, and other methods were used, we used the Content Delivery Network, which further reduced the waiting time for a full review load, this made it possible to deliver data to the user faster.

Realism

While trying to increase the realism, we ran into a problem that often arises in game design. We needed realistic highlights with varying degrees of blur. We solved the issue with a special MGEM shader. At the same time, for a 3D artist, the work is simplified as much as possible and, in fact, is reduced to creating a smooth texture. The complexity of the task was that a suitable mathematical model of the shader and software for preparing the environment textures did not exist and we wrote them from scratch.

Automation, production acceleration and goal setting algorithm
When it is critical to create a large amount of content in a relatively short time, automation of some processes is required. To this end, we have created strict regulations for all processes that can be performed without human intervention.

To speed up the integration, we developed our own client-server 3D software, the specificity of our tasks did not allow the use of ready-made solutions. Today, all 3D reviews are equipped with meta information in this software, and the compilation takes place on the server.

Why are some products included in the next series of reviews, while others are not? We have a specially created department that determines the degree of demand for various goods from retailers. Depending on the demand, a production line is formed.

As a conclusion

I hope this information is enough to get an idea of ​​what 3D reviews are today on a technical level. I note that we tried to find other companies that create similar content, since from the REVIEW3 offer we are only interested in headphones so far, but according to our information, no one else is doing this. If you want us to use three-dimensional content on the pages of our store – write to us in the comments. Also write if you think that such content is not needed today.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *