Recently I was testing various online products and plugins such as Webflow (website builder), Spline (online 3D authoring tool), Model Viewer (3D model viewer for web browsers) and 3D Viewer (WordPress plugin), to name a few.
It’s actually great to have all these just at the tip of your finger. Just Google something that you are looking for, and boom, most of the features that you can think of are already available in some ways. Isn’t that great?
Sure…, but the problem is that whichever cool product you find, you will end up discovering that you have to pay in order to get something meaningful out of it. Yes, I understand. It’s still generous that they all offer free versions. But all of their business models are carefully crafted so that if you are serious about accomplishing something solid, you have to upgrade to the paid version. It’s annoying.
Below is an example of Model Viewer, a WordPress plugin rendering glTF 3D model exported from another service called Spline. Model Viewer actually worked great, but Spline did not let me export materials which includes colors) in their free version. That’s why all the cubes are in white.
I was also playing around with Webflow, and tried embedding Spline scene in a page. I may still need to check more if I did everything correctly. But my Spline scene never loaded in my Webflow page. Instead, my Webflow page seemed to be rendering Spline’s dummy scene. I have a feeling that the free version of Webflow does not let you embed your Spline scene…