Casually rendering ~a hundred million triangles, in the browser.

All thanks to @sea3dformat's cool Nanite-style renderer for @threejs.

I've added GLB-to-meshlet and PBR rendering to it, very exciting to see where this is going! @sea3dformat @threejs You can try it out here, and drop GLBs to see them processed + rendered: .…ee-meshlets-z23hmxbz1jwlff.needle.run

Apple's 3D viewer is based on @threejs, uses @glTF3D and gets more impressive every year!

CAD meshes, environment blends, reflection probes, occlusion: let's take a look at what's special this time –

(long thread ahead) First, some eyecandy. The viewer looks CLEAN. Why?

- the viewer snaps to canonical angles (side, front, etc.)
- there's likely some blending of environments, with specifically tuned environments per canonical view

The new 3D models at Apple's website are using @glTF3D, @threejs r165 and gltf-transform 4.0.8 by @donrmccurdy on the iPhone 16 page 🔥

The files aren't really valid though, and won't load in many viewers – but we will fix that.

Let's take a look under the hood –

When downloading the files, you get a bunch of .gltf and .ktx2 files. Curiously, the glTF files are invalid – there are hundreds of errors, for example

– not declaring extensions (KHR_texture_basisu)
- wrong image MIME types (some JPEGs are named PNG!)
- accessor and normals errors

When Apple releases a new AR scene for their events, there's often interesting tech art in those files!

Let's do a little digging ⚒️👀We'll venture into browser debugging, Blender, usdview, Unity, three.js, Needle Engine :)

And the animation is live at apple-event-file-2023.glitch.me The file is hidden behind the main logo (on iOS, it launches in AR). Since it's just a link we can take a peek at the USDZ file from a browser's inspector.

Also, it looks like they limit the AR experience to iPhones for some reason.