Strata Live 3D

Strata Live 3D is one of the quickest ways to produce a real-time 3D walkthrough from a set of models and animations. It doesn’t help you create models from scratch, but is purely there to get your 3D designs (which will need to be in VRML2, Alias Studio, DWF, or K3D format) on to the web as interactive 3D objects.

The program creates Java objects, which it offers up in a HTML page, a Flash document, or inside a PDF file. From there you can use your own authoring tools to set the model into a larger project. This means that your creations will be viewable on virtually any computer, without forcing the user to download add-ons.

Any animation you’ve added to your objects in your 3D package will be imported into Strata Live (except mesh deformations). Animations are then available to you as separate timelines for each object. Each of these can be triggered separately by the viewer in the customisable browser that Strata Live creates. In other words, you can animate a car with spinning wheels, and doors that open and close, and then set those events to be triggered by the viewer independently of each other.

You can also add lights and materials, customise the viewer and alter the level of detail in a model in order to produce a smaller web file, as well as using scripts to create more sophisticated interactions.

The lack of import options for common 3D formats is a little disappointing. However, it’s easy to find your way around the package and most of the time you’ll be using it to complete very simple tasks – importing files, tweaking animation and exporting in another format.