'Light' Web Viewer natively supports glTF 2.0 assets, including
assembly structure, names, transformations, meshes (triangulation), materials, textures and Draco compression.
glTF/glb support makes 'Light' Web Viewer a part of a strong ecosystem with numerous applications, model converters, viewers and tools.
PBR metal-roughness material workflow provides definition of realistic materials, displayed consistently and predictably across various applications.
Model generation
glTF/glb models might be prepared using:
Open Cascade Presentation Generator
This command-line tool naturally complements 'Light' Web Viewer with model conversion and preparation functionality.
It supports a vast amount of CAD file formats (when appropriate license applies) and could be installed on a workstation or a server.
Open Cascade CAD Processor
This application supports a wide range of CAD file formats,
provides useful model processing tools (including simplification) and has glTF export option.
All these operations could be called interactively from application's GUI, automated via scripting,
and deeply customized / integrated into your application via CAD Processor SDK.
Open Cascade CAD Assistant
This freeware application allows converting STEP / IGES models into glTF format through it's user interface.
Open CASCADE Technology
This open-source framework supports glTF format and can be used for development of custom solutions.
Other tools
Enjoy strong ecosystem around glTF format and use tools directly providing glTF import/export
like Blender and many others!
Model complexity
'Light' Web Viewer may handle middle-sized models, and a special preprocessing should be done to avoid performance issues on large models.
Tools like Open Cascade CAD Processor
provide model simplification and mesh decimation capabilities for optimizing CAD models for usage in web applications.
Make sure to test viewer performance on largest models using target devices and browsers.
Model file size
Large glTF models could be hundreds of megabytes in size, leading to considerable data transfer delays within slow networks.
'Light' Web Viewer supports Draco compression extension to glTF format,
usually reducing file size in ten times at cost of a little bit longer model decoding.
A multi-threaded decoding of such compressed models allows 'Light' Web Viewer to display complete model in 3D Viewer as fast as possible.
Make sure to enable Draco compression within your glTF generation workflow to optimize network data transfers.
Model protection
'Light' Web Viewer displays an entire model on a client size, which raises extra concerns about protecting intellectual properties (IP-protection).
It is important to understand, that model should presented in memory in a standard form (as indexed triangulation array of vertices)
to be displayed by a GPU via graphic libraries like WebGL.
This means that user is always capable of extracting triangulated geometry that he/she sees on the screen via low-level tools.
While considering IP-protection, the following steps might be considered:
Avoid B-Rep geometry definition
Triangulated data generated from B-Rep geometry could be reconstructed back into B-Rep only via an expensive reverse-engineering process.
glTF file format is a triangulation-only format, which should be already enough to protect CAD geometry from being easily reconstructed (for manufacturing purposes).
This, however, doesn't cover scenarios of artistic models and 3D-printable models.
Passing model through simplification tools
Model simplification might help removing important manufacturing details,
while mesh decimation and lossy compression naturally reduce model precision.
Using non-standard formats
It is always possible to reverse-engineer undocumented file format, but using such formats prevents opening model in external viewers and tools straight ahead.
'Light' Web Viewer supports a slightly modified, 'obfuscated' version of glTF format for that purposes.
Model distortion and watermarking
Advanced scenarios might include passing model through algorithms intentionally distorting geometry.
So that they will look normally on the screen, but would prevent their manufacturing.
This might include non-uniform scaling, randomized small deviations and more expensive algorithms.
As a special case, instead of destructive deviations, algorithm might embed non-trivially visible marks (watermarks),
that would not prevent non-authorized manufacturing, but could be used to reveal/prove IP-protection breach.