Verold Studio: A Realtime WebGL-based Collaborative 3D Editor in the Browser

What you see in the public gallery are the personal models that artists have put on display for their portfolio. In the background is a robust set of tools that let you review and collaborate in realtime. Every project is a multi-user space, meaning that if more than one person comes in, they can see each other, snap to another user's camera, and see material and scene changes as they are made.

We've got several schools piloting the platform - as a way for instructors to come into a scene with students and give them realtime feedback on WIP. Our first game studio clients are coming on board, doing daily reviews of outsourced work. And with the API that we're releasing in the coming months, we'll use the same tools to let web designers review and discuss assets being sourced from artists for the 3D websites, apps, and games being built on our engine.

Read more: http://verold.com/blog/2013/1/15/mr-doob-at-dotjs-threejs-ne...

When you upload a model, it gets dropped into a scene that can be viewed collaboratively by your team or your peers. Try visiting a project at the same time as someone else, and you'll see how that works. You can also click the Google+ button to launch into a video conference with your collaborative 3D space at the center.

On the editor: it's not a geometry editor, but what we do provide you with is the ability to create scenes/levels, and fine tune your materials. The power of the editor comes with the runtime that we'll be debuting at GDC this year. You can use our platform to host and manage your assets, create your levels, then pull those into your application and use Three.js to add dynamism to your applications. You'll see the first reference apps on that platform in the next couple of weeks, and a public release in March.

It's odd because the screenshots on the site do indeed show various editing controls (and make references to collaboration), but I also only get a viewer when I try it (even if I sign in).

Maybe the editor version hasn't been released yet?

We've focused on professional artists, and support all the main formats that they use. The difference in load time is because a lot of what's in our public gallery is from ZBrush, 3D-Coat, or Mudbox - high res sculpts that were not meant for realtime. It's more testiment to our processing engine that we can make these run as well as we do. Not exactly apples to oranges comparing these sculpts to Sketchup models on Skethfab. We've written about the comparison to Sketchfab here: http://verold.com/blog/2013/1/13/verold-studio-vs-sketchfab-...

I played around with both after reading this article, and while you're right that there's a big resemblance, that sketchfab is very fast, and supports lots of formats, verold seems a fair bit more sophisticated in what you can do: the material editing in verold seems to support many more types of materials, and as best as I could tell, verold allows multiple uploaded meshes to be positioned within a single model, whereas sketchfab is limited to a single mesh upload.

Both are fundamentally rather limited though, more like "model tweakers" than real editors, as you can't create new shapes / meshes in them or edit the geometry of existing meshes.