Project Elmyra

Hint: Project Elmyra is not in active development, but may provide useful functionality for WebGL server-based embedding. The question for OSE remains if it's easier to provide WebGL embeds via web pages or rendered from a server. Last commit to Project Elmyra was 2016

Christoph Varga (alt) <christoph@cminusv.com> Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 5:03 PM to me

Hi Marcin, i am one of the axiom group here in vienna and i was wondering if the project elmyra is interesting for you..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=l8x8Kz1T1uc

Simon works on it, it is an automated rendering server where you can throw your 3d files in and all old links are updated on demand.

Greetings, christoph

Simon at Apertus AXIOM Team Talk

Vlog update - https://www.apertus.org/axiom-team-talk-volume-12.1-article-december-2016

Github download - https://github.com/apertus-open-source-cinema/elmyra

Simon at Blender Conference 2015

Article on Apertus project - https://www.apertus.org/project-elmyra-looking-back-looking-forward-article-january-2016

Discussion

1

Hey Marcin,

Thanks for getting in touch!

I see you have a lot of questions :) probably it would be easiest and most productive if we arranged for a skype call or hangout so i can answer all your questions and we can further discuss matters! Easiest for me would be between 14-17:00 CET (any day more or less), if that's generally a good time for you as well, feel free to just propose one or two concrete dates/times, if that's generally a bad time for you we'll find something else of course, just let me know! :)

Short answers meanwhile:

Usable right now? Yes!

SaaS? It could be, but no concrete plans yet.

Should we install? The preview release is right now specifically set up to allow trying out Elmyra without any configuration/installation. If you're convinced that Elmyra exactly covers your needs, you can install it on a server right away too, I'll happily assist. (some small adjustments will probably be needed)

Stable? I designed the architecture with a lot of care, so it's quite robust, however it's also (historically and for the time being still) a R&D project, so there are loose ends - mostly things that are/were irrelevant for researching/designing and not worth implementing as long as no one is actively using them. E.g.: The interactive 3D widget generation works - but I haven't had any time to actually make it look sensible. Or another example: The cross-section modifier does not (yet) work with the "blueprint" style for technical reasons, but the interface (I think) offers that combination. And most importantly, as long as there are no 1-2 projects who actually dedicate to trying to integrate Elmyra in a real project environment I'm hesitant to invest loads and loads of time in setting up rigorous testing and getting things super stable. (only to discover that in the end maybe no one uses it and the time was wasted ... ;)) So summing up: Right now it's not stable, but as soon as actual usecases lay down a direction and a concrete need, I'm sure we'll be able to quickly make the system mature into something that's "tried and tested" and solidly rounded off all around.

p2p? The platform itself is built around a centralized server (especially the interface), it's very lightweight though and probably will scale very well a loong way, we could definitely look into making the rendering backend distributed though! (should the need arise soon) Right now it's all a single instance implementation still. (again because making it fast was not the point to prove, this has been done everywhere else and we could do that as well later, but the rest of the system was what we were interested in :))

Hope that clarifies a few things already!

Best, Simon

2

Hi Simon,

We would like to create a capacity to take our FreeCAD files and convert them to embeddable 3D visualizations for the wiki and wordpress. Is Elmyra capable of doing this? Can you discuss briefly the status of this functionality? What is the advantage of Elmyra compared to generating WebGL embeddable files for this purpose?

We could allocate somebody on our side to install Elmyra on our server. Is the documentation sufficient for somebody to install this? We are big on documentation. Can you help assist us in documenting how Elmyra works so we can get involved? CAD display in websites is important to us.

Is CET same as CEST? 17 CEST appears to be 10 AM CST. Can we meet on Thursday or Friday for 1/2 hour to begin discussion on what it would take to get us going with 3D embeds?

Marcin

Links

• Discussion with Simon on an Open Source Consumer Grade Camera