3D viewer – an overview

Note: The 3D viewer is a premium template. Premium templates are only accessible to customers on our Enterprise plans. To learn more about our different plans, get in touch with our Sales team.

What's it for?

Use this template to display 3D scenes with physically based rendering. It's well-suited for a number of use cases displaying 3D content, including architectural visualization and product tours. By adding your 3D model to a Flourish story, you can zoom around and annotate it with different annotation styles to tell a story.

How to get started

1

Choose the 3D viewer starting point from the template chooser.

2

Next, you'll need to source your 3D model file for the scene. We recommend binary glTF files (.glb), but also support multiple formats:

• glTF
• OBJ
• FBX

If your model has additional files for textures that you would like to include, you can compress all the relevant files in a ZIP archive and upload that.

The maximum size for 3D models is 25 MB. This is to avoid long loading time. If your model is too large to upload to Flourish, we recommend using a tool such as Blender to decimate your model and compress your textures.

Great sources for finding models include Sketchfab, Turbosquid, clara.io, thingiverse and 3DMDB.

3

Your next step would be to pick an environment map from our list of presets, which will determine the lighting for the scene. They are also used as the default background image. 

You can upload your own equirectangular images for custom lighting too, which can be found on sites such as HDRI Haven or HDRI Skies. 




4

To change the default view of your model, you can change the pitch, heading and distance in the "Camera and Controls" settings



5

Choose between an orbit camera and a free look camera. While the orbit camera spins around a model's focal point, the free look camera points outwards from a point in space. Free look will grant you a bit more control but is not as straightforward to use.

6

If you'd like to show different views and animate between them, you'll have to add your model to a Flourish story. This will also allow you to add annotations.