SculptGL

[MikuzA]

Hello guys,

I'm not a 3D/graphic guy myself but stumbled upon this awesome WebGL sculpting app!
I thought some of you might be interested in trying it out!

And first thing I checked, yes, it has import and export possibilities to some extensions..

http://www.stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/

[Jackolantern]

Wow, that is really amazing!

[a_bertrand]

I saw this a while ago. It tries to replicate sculptris (which is free) or zbrush. But honestly it is not really usable.

[hallsofvallhalla]

yeah reminds me of zbrush. I am just happy to ee something like this native in the browser.

[Jackolantern]

I saw this a while ago. It tries to replicate sculptris (which is free) or zbrush. But honestly it is not really usable.

Obviously it is a long way off from something like zbrush in the browser, but I bet if you looked back at sculpting programs from the early 90's, I bet it would be about on-par. It is a place to start to someday have something like zbrush in the browser

[a_bertrand]

My question is... how really useful it would be, and how really you would need to have it. For me, it's a fun test, and nice to see it gives some results, but beside that it has little future.

[Jackolantern]

I think there is a future to almost everything that can be run in the browser. If you could get something like zbrush running in the browser, then you have removed the platform-specific nature of binary executables.

[a_bertrand]

Yes, if we could ideally remove the platform dependence I would be the first to be happy. Yet let's be honest is that such a huge effect for real world developers? No, as 90% or + uses windows. So even if you develop just for windows you will be up and running. Web browser development however do add other advantages like the fact you don't need to install an application to run in, updates are delivered in real time and don't require some sort of deployment, as well as you would have some security against malicious software (even if we all know that viruses uses the web to replicate as well).

On the other side, giving away your whole code without any restriction is not something everyone can afford, browsers do add some abstraction layer between your CPU and your code which means it will always have some cost, the soft could disappear from one day to the other (while if you installed it on your PC it will run as long as you don't re-install your PC), you are limited as developer to what the browser offer and not to the capabilities of the machine, and a lot more drawbacks (I stop here as I don't want to fill the site with my rants).

So will the future be a full browser OS like google tried to convince us? I highly doubt it. Will we ever have a way to make fully portable software? I doubt as the tech already exists since ages, but there was let's say a cold reaction to it.

[a_bertrand]

Check out this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/quake- ... 25037.html

Somebody is actually going away of the browsers.

[Jackolantern]

So will the future be a full browser OS like google tried to convince us? I highly doubt it. Will we ever have a way to make fully portable software? I doubt as the tech already exists since ages, but there was let's say a cold reaction to it.

I am not saying that the future is going to be Chrome OS or some other browser-as-an-OS. However, cross-platform development has been looking better and better in the last 5 to 8 years or so. When a lot of these cross-platform solutions were created, we really, for all intents and purposes, had 2 platforms: Linux for business, and Windows for everything at home (Apple was on life support and didn't even play into the equation in the 90's).

Today that is very different: Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and dozens of smaller mobile players. The only thing these platforms have in common (they don't even all share the same CPU architecture) is the browser. And the platform fragmentation doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. Mobile is going to become more and more important, but desktop isn't going anywhere either. Windows' market share is shrinking a bit (from 97% to 86% in the last few years) and devs are going to have to seriously start considering OSX as well.

What is the solution? The web, and the power that browsers are amassing at an amazing rate.