Best Web Viewer Practices

[Jan Simon]

Here are a number of best practices if you are looking to get the most out of the Web Viewer:

1. Use optimal materials with or without baking. The material support in the Web Viewer is very similar to KeyVR's support, so you can temporarily refer to the KeyVR manual for an overview of what KeyShot materials will look like in the Web Viewer, with or without baking. It can also make sense to upload a simple test scene first, with cubes or spheres, to test out the materials you are planning to use.

2. Be aware of both triangle count and scene file size. The upload dialog in KeyShot will warn you when your scene is exceeded any limits, but your mileage may vary. How many triangles or MB of scene size you can use depends mostly on the hardware you are targeting: A Windows computer with a modern GPU running Chrome, Firefox or Edge will be able to render millions of triangles and scenes that are multiple hundred MBs large. An iPhone running Safari will be limited to a couple hundred thousand triangles and scenes around 50-100 MB, depending on the iPhone generation. Use the mesh simplification tool to reduce the number of triangles and the quality slider(s) in the upload dialog in KeyShot if you would like to achieve better performance on your target hardware.

3. It is advisable to split your geometry into as few parts as are needed. 100 parts with 1000 triangles each are much easier to render than 10000 parts with 10 triangles. This does not matter for part numbers under roughly 100, so no need to go overboard. But avoid repetitive elements like individual screws for example that add up to thousands of parts.

4. The scale of your scene and environment matters. For best shadow results, make sure your scene is tightly surrounded by your environment. A car at real-life dimensions with a 1km environment size will show undesirable shadows.

5. Environments are expensive, especially at 100% quality in the upload dialog in KeyShot. Consider turning the slider down if you need a large amount of environments, otherwise reduce the environments in your scene to a small handful of representative choices.

6. If you want to use materials with textures, make sure to use the UV projection method or enable baking in the upload dialog in KeyShot. Otherwise your textures will not show up correctly.


Hope this helps!