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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

The kicker here is they've built a 3d workflow (i.e. OBJ and FBX support, and direct Blender export). This means that, unlike with almost any other option you don't start out needing to implement 3d import from scratch.

On the down-side they do not appear to have implemented 3d animation yet. Assuming we can go from animated FBX to Babylon fairly seamlessly, this starts to look pretty useful.

The next thing would be a halfway decent positional sound library.

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PlayCanvas [disclaimer: I'm CTO] has a full 3D import pipeline from FBX, COLLADA and OBJ which supports skinned animation and all default materials.

Plus we have a level designer, physics engine, scripting API, hosted publishing, and a halfway decent positional sound library :-)

You can see importing models and animations in action here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_fRcV-3wk, or signup for yourself [http://playcanvas.com]

Three.js has OBJ support natively (I've written a extension to allow you to view them directily on your github[1]). COLLADA and glTF, which provide support for animations, are also supported[2].

Cannon.js is a promising physics engine[3].

Nonetheless, it is exciting to see Microsoft not only supporting WebGL, but also promiting open source libraries to ease development on the platform.

[1] https://github.com/danielribeiro/three-hub

[2] http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_loader_collada.html

[3] http://cannonjs.org/

I tend to be dismissive of OBJ support since it's so easy to do and doesn't get you terribly far, but yes that's nice.

Collada support is a lot more impressive, but FBX support -- even though FBX is proprietary -- is much more useful given the wider and broader support for FBX out there (even Blender can export to FBX).

Blender export supports objects animations

They don't support bones yet, so this is probably straight transforms. We need bones and skeletal deformations.

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