Well, its time for Chapter 2 in my definition search of 3dvia.  In case you missed it, make sure you catch the first installment of my posts on 3dvia.

This time out we are going to look into the Community and Studio sections of the site.  The Community area can be accessed by clicking on the “Community” tab at the top of the main page.  Simply put, this area is all about the registered users of the site.  You can choose to display all 3D model contributors or all users of the site.  The default list displayed is all 3D model contributors.  So far 441 users have contributed models to the site.  There is a filter pull down menu that you can use to display the users by total number of models, comments on models, models rating, and ratings on models.  Selecting the “All Users” page reveals that there are 12,169 registered users of 3dvia.  This list can be filtered by date last updated, activity, creation date, comments contribution, and name.

Selecting the “Groups” area at the top of the page takes you to the next section of the Community area.  This displays a list of groups that have been established by the users of the site.  There looks to be around 50 groups that currently exist.  The range of groups are pretty diverse.  You can find groups on airplanes, sailing, chairs, computers, avatars, & houses just to name a few.  It appears that users can become members of the various groups with the simple click of a button onscreen.  Discussions can also be created on each group home page.

The next area to look at on the Community part of the site is the “3D Tutorials” page.  Most of the tutorials shown deal with 3dvia Shape, which we will cover later.  On this part of the site I only could view three tutorials but additional content is posted in the next area that we will explore which is the “3DVIA Blog” section.  Many of the Blog entries are posted by BostonDave who runs product marketing for 3dvia.  There are also other contributors to this Blog.  There is a lot of good information here.  I was able to get a better feel for the origins of the site by checking the Blog Archive.

Does the Community aspect of the site end here?  Not quite.  Most of you I’m sure have heard of Facebook.  Maybe you have heard of it but don’t know much about it.  I’ll give you the short definition.  It is a social networking site that allows users to share links, videos, photos, & more.  What does it have to do with 3dvia?  The answer is an application called 3DCollage written by 3dvia that allows users to overlay 3D models from the 3dvia model gallery on top of your favorite pictures.  They call these pictures “3D mashups” and they can be published to your Facebook profile.  Since I have a Facebook account, I HAD to try it out.  The result was a picture of me hanging out with my buddies Patrick and Gary.  (My 8 year old thought this was hilarious.)  Even though I am NOT very experienced with Facebook, setting this image up using 3DCollage was surprisingly easy.  The only knock I had on it was there was only one direction of model rotation supported.  (This is why Gary is climbing up my sleeve and not sitting on my shoulder.)

The Studio area of the site ended up being the most “fun” in the review thus far.  This is a showcase of fully interactive 3D exp-experiences (games) built by users and community partners.  If you have a 3D game, you can submit it to this area of the site.  All in all there are 10 different 3D “games” posted.  All of the applications appear to use the 3D Life Player from Virtools (A Dassault Systemes company).  I didn’t get to play with all of them but I thought the Rollarcoaster Experience was quite fun!  I do wish that more of the featured experiences had an option to be played in English.  This is a problem I ran into with the Versailles 3D and The Toyota Auris Ice Experience.

That is all for this installment.  The next post will talk about the software that is a part of the 3dvia site.

Stay tuned…..more to come!