MediaGoblin adds 3d model support, uses Blender as backend
Open Source media publishing tool MediaGoblin has added Blender previewing support!
Alexandre writes:Recently Blender got a new interesting use. MediaGoblin, a free platform for publishing images, audio and video files (think of it as of self-hosted YouTube, Flickr and SoundCloud), is now capable of rendering previews of STL and OBJ models. For that it uses Blender and thingiview.js (which renders the data via WebGL). The work was done by request of LulzBot developers (LulzBot is a 3D printer with open specs) who wanted to use MediaGoblin as a free version of Thingiverse.
With that feature in place MediaGoblin has basics of a digital asset management platform. This particular development was discussed at Blender Conference this year between Tube open movie team, renderfarm.fi team and MediaGoblin team.
More info on that with quotes from Nathan Letwory, Julius Tuomisto, Fateh Slavitskaya and Chris Webber (MediaGoblin) on LibreGraphicsWorld.
Finally, the MediaGoblin team has an ongoing fundraiser that closes in just few days. They are aiming to collect 60K to fund full-time development of MediaGoblin, which will bring many useful features.
Personally I wasn’t much interested in MediaGoblin first. But then Fateh mailed me and explained all the background (they are good friends with Chris Webber, who developed some of the tools for the Tube team; and the digital asset management is something of a huge interest to Tube folks), and that did get my interest :)
It would be great if you could do a bit of coverage at blendernation.com too, like I did at LGW. A free scalable decentralized DAM solution could be interesting to many users. And securing full-time development would certainly do it good :)
Fantastic that they added support for 3D. I do wonder about MediaGoblin’s dependencies on normal shared style hosting, though. I mean how many server spaces give you access to Gstreamer and Blender? I really wish they’d use FFMPEG instead of Gstreamer as the video backend, and that *is* made available on some shared hosts. The Blender part is harder, as there’s really no common shared serverside 3D app.
As a usability tip, they really need to rename the “WebGL” button to “3D View” or suchlike. WebGL is a term that is far more technical than is needed to explain what the feature does.
Well, shared hosting isn’t where you would typically run MediaGoblin, wouldn’t you? :) OTOH, more common deps are a good thing, indeed.
Interesting. I’ll keep an eye on this development.
well, I’m guessing that mediagoblin itself does not have deps on blender or gstreamer, rather the media backends for 3D and video do not. This doesn’t stop someone from writing a plugin for either that did video based on ffmpeg or 3D without using blender to render stills (but still using webgl for the interactive view)
That being said, gstreamer might provide a saner api and a extra functionality that ffmpeg doesn’t have. And it might be even possible to get this stuff running on shared hosting (not an expert here)
Good point on using something like ‘interactive 3D’ or so instead of webgl.