Designing a multiplatform pipeline for 3D scenes

Many digital production companies (whether for games, animated productions or digital cinema) now control and review their assets via web-based tools, due to the fast-moving ecosystem and rapid prototyping of web applications. The ability to access such tools via mobile interfaces is increasing in importance, particularly with the rise in power of mobile hardware. Yet, in the field of real-time 3D graphics, progress is hampered by both the lack of cross-platform software compatibility (particularly lack of mobile browser WebGL support), and by lower hardware performance for certain plaforms, especially mobile. In this paper, we analyze the barriers for developing cross-platform 3D graphics technology and, based on this analysis, present a suitable cross-platform pipeline that allows the viewing and editing of real-time 3D scenes in a collaborative environment. We compare a mobile implementation of this pipeline with a WebGL-based engine for desktop use, and present and discuss results on the differences between these two implementations. We further demonstrate a system for collaborative 3D scene creation using our pipeline with a custom plugin for the modeling software Autodesk Maya.