Exporting 3D Objects from Blender to Cloudinary for Optimized Web Delivery

[00:00:00] Welcome to DevJams. This is where we talk with developers who are doing innovative, inspiring, interesting things with code, and typically doing it with images and videos. Typically, also with Cloudinary powering much of the development efforts that they’re taking. My name is Sam Brace. I am the Senior Director of Customer Education and Community at Cloudinary, and I am so excited for this episode because, in this episode, we’re looking inside rather than outside, we’re talking to someone, Anthony, who is one of our developer support engineers, who has built an amazing project being able to link Blender, which is for those that aren’t tied to the 3D modeling space, one of the most ubiquitously used pieces of software when it comes to being able to create 3D models and [00:01:00] being able to use those in many different types of applications, such as movies, gaming… but he’s found a way to take those 3D models and easily export them from Blender over to Cloudinary. So you can use them for web and mobile types of purposes, such as turning them into images, being able to display those in product galleries and even more. So we’re very excited to be talking to Anthony about the work that he’s done to be able to really bring in a lot of use cases that are in the 3D space and bring those into web delivery and product gallery purposes for all sorts of types of users and buyers.

Joining me for every single one of these episodes is Jen Brissman, and Jen is a technical curriculum engineer here at Cloudinary, so if you’ve ever experienced any of the Cloudinary Academy courses and the workshops that we put out as well, of course, as the podcast that you are listening to right now, you have probably gone through something that Jen has helped to create.

So, we’re very happy to have Jen here as our [00:02:00] co-host for this episode. So Jen, welcome to the episode.

Jen Brissman: Hey, happy to be here.

Sam Brace: So Jen, a little bit of your personal take on this. Why are you excited to be talking to Anthony here today?

Jen Brissman: Well, in addition to the fact that Anthony is one of my friends at Cloudinary I’m happy to have him on here because we haven’t had an episode focusing on 3D before, and this feels like a new concept, and I know I’ve learned a lot just getting ready for this episode. So I’m just excited for the topic in general.

Sam Brace: Excellent. I am too. And you’re absolutely right. This is one of the first times we’ve really broached 3D as a concept within this podcast. So I think it’s for anybody that’s really trying to understand what the space is about, or maybe you already do know what the space is about and maybe are understanding how Cloudinary plays in this space. This is definitely a good primer for both of those use cases excellent point. Jen.

Now before we bring in our friend Anthony, we do wanna indicate that this is a DevJams episode, as you know, but this is a [00:03:00] DevJams episode that, of course, is one of many. We have plenty of episodes, including ones that have to do with topics about our various SDKs or APIs, ways that people have been able to build lots of types of integrations with certain programs or plugins.

And all of these are available at cloudinary.com/podcasts. So take the time to look through all of the various libraries. We literally have years of content available for you within this overall space. And I will also say that the conversations about these episodes are absolutely able to be had at our overall Cloudinary community.

So that’s gonna be at community.cloudinary.com, and this is where you can go and talk with other Cloudinary users if you happen to be one yourself, and hopefully you are, to be able to have them answering questions about things that they’ve come across in their own projects, maybe even dealing with 3D.

So definitely some places to go before we start our overall conversation. In case you’re interested in starting [00:04:00] to say, is this the first time that Sam and Jen have talked about development topics with developers? Not quite, let’s go in and bring in our friend Anthony, and start talking about all things 3D.

So Anthony, welcome to the program.

Anthony Datu: Hi Sam. Hi Jen. Thank you for having me.

Sam Brace: Wonderful. Anthony, I know the amazingness that you are. So tell us a little bit about that though. Tell us about what do you do at Cloudinary? How did you come to Cloudinary? The work that you do.

Anthony Datu: Yes. I joined Cloudinary a little bit over a year ago almost two years now.

But I am a developer support where the day-to-day task is to find solutions for our enterprise customers as well as the free tier customers. We are a heavily API first SaaS product. I enjoy it every day. [00:05:00] But yeah that’s basically the gist of it. We do have a lot of freedom in terms of what we can do and building internal tools within the company. Yeah.

Sam Brace: And so then one thing that of course when you’re working with customers globally, you’re working with customers that have unique codes. We work with many different SDKs and frameworks and languages. You’ve probably encountered some that started the efforts of this overall project, which was being able to start working more in the 3D space Now, How did this ultimately come about? Was this a support ticket? Was this a customer inquiry? Was this just your own imagination trying to figure out how to connect Cloudinary to Blender? What anticipated this project?

Anthony Datu: Yes. It’s a little bit of both. We have had quite a few tickets regarding about 3D inquiries. I do have a little bit of thing [00:06:00] in me that I would like to see what the 3D is all about.

Plus I do have a 7 year old son that loves Roblox and Minecraft, so, I showed him what is the Roblox studio, so instead him playing just the Roblox, I make sure that he creates stuff. So that’s one of the things that, that drives me into creating a 3D model.

Sam Brace: Absolutely. And that’s, it is nice that you’ll be able to blend things that you’re finding professionally, personally, and being able to benefit from this. So, I’d love to know more about Blender. So, tell me about this overall program. For those that aren’t familiar with it, I’m sure those that are tied to the 3D space are like, yeah, you’re telling us about something we already know about.

But for those that don’t know, what is Blender and also, why did you decide to start taking the efforts for building your plugin with this particular software?

Anthony Datu: Like what you mentioned earlier, Blender is a [00:07:00] ubiquitous program for 3D. It’s free and open source. They have tried an enormous amount of improvements in the last couple years since, version 2.8.

Now they’re in version three or above. But I find it appealing that it’s royalty free. And it’s very easy to to create an integration with Blender and it’s even more easier to create integration with Cloudinary. That what brings me to, creating an integration with with Blender and Cloudinary. But, Blender in essence is a 3D modeling application. It has a shading application it has video editing capability. You can do animation on [00:08:00] it. So it’s really a wholesome, a lot of different kinds of features in just one application. So it’s really awesome.

Sam Brace: And I think what was smart about what you’ve done is that from what I know and from what you just said, is that Blender is used by many people within the 3D modeling creation space, so if there is a place to build a plugin to help the most amount of users, it seems like blunder was just a natural choice.

Anthony Datu: Absolutely. I agree with that statement. Like what I said it’s a free and open source, you as a student, you didn’t have to, go in a way to just download a pirated version of a software. You have it for free, basically.

Sam Brace: Exactly. Which is good. It’s absolutely good.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Sam Brace: So tell me [00:09:00] about what the goal is for the plugin. So if I understand it correctly, it’s where you create something in Blender, some type of 3D object that you want to have, and then what does your plugin do with that object at that point?

Anthony Datu: Yeah, so the plugin in itself would eliminate the hassle of. The 3D modeler didn’t have to go through the file system to to bring about all the necessary pieces that what makes the 3D model it is for example, he didn’t have to find and look for where is the the textures the GLTF file, the bin file in order to package it into a ZIP file and then upload it to a cloud storage application, right?

So [00:10:00] this Cloudinary exporter will do it for you. So it take, I believe it takes away a lot of error prone steps and it just, pushes to Cloudinary directly, the whole scene including the animation.

Sam Brace: Excellent. Excellent. Jen what questions do you, is there anything you have for Anthony before we pop over his to his screen and have us walk us through this?

Jen Brissman: I guess the thing that I was wondering is was there a real pain point that this was solving for or were you just thinking, I’d like to take a bunch of things and make it happen all at once? Was there, were there errors that you were seeing that you were trying to get ahead of, or you were just trying to, in general, make a convenient…

Anthony Datu: Correct. Correct. So if you go over some of the steps that we have in Cloudinary, in order for us to upload a 3D, you need to be able to package [00:11:00] certain files within the 3D object that necessary. In order to display the correct texture, whatever that 3D model consists of and I felt like if this is not done correctly it’s error prone. I know in my personal experience, I have quite struggled, where in the hierarchy are we placing those files? Stuff like that.

Jen Brissman: Yeah. Okay. Let’s pop over and see the functionality demonstration of what you’ve built. So everything that we’ve talked about, it’s real. Let’s see it. How does it work?

Anthony Datu: Cool. Can you guys see my screen?

Sam Brace: Absolutely.

Anthony Datu: Okay. So here we have Blender. Let’s say that I’m working on a 3D object like this Chuck Taylor, very classic Chuck Taylor converse. So I, let’s say that I created [00:12:00] an animation to display the product, to rotate the product.

So easy enough if you have installed the plugin, which is included, the steps is included in my repo. That will give you a Cloudinary panel, and you just fill up a couple of, a few fields like the cloud name, the API key, the upload preset the public ID, and the preferred tags that you want.

Then if I push the upload button, What we should be able to see here. It takes a minute because this is a high quality 3D really high resolution 3D object.

Sam Brace: Absolutely.

Anthony Datu: Here in the info window panel you can see that we [00:13:00] got the response from the Cloudinary API. It’s saying here that this now has the public ID of blender/chucktaylor_devjam, and all the other information here, such as the Secure URL and the URL. Now, if we hop over to so what I guess I’m jumping ahead way too ahead. So what it did is it, Zipped the necessary file into a single file and it upload that to Cloudinary.

Sam Brace: And then, so at that point, so we can see that it’s, so now everything that’s there, so as you said, all the texture files, all the things that make up this, it’s all zipped together.

It’s all been delivered into Cloudinary at this point. And then at that point then it’s an asset. So…

Anthony Datu: Correct.

Sam Brace: [00:14:00] Before we jump into the code that you’re showing here on the GitHub, I’d love for you to pop over to your management console here.

Anthony Datu: Sure.

Sam Brace: And be able to show Hey, it’s real, it’s there. Okay, there it is.

Anthony Datu: Yes.

Sam Brace: Okay. So it’s, you can see Chuck Taylor DevJams, and we can see that it has an asset type of an image. And it’s also a GLTZ. So it unzips as it comes through, if I understand that.

Anthony Datu: Correct. Yes. So it recognized it’s a GLTF format. That’s the format that I chose because it’s a royalty free format and it’s well supported by Cloudinary.

So from a dev support perspective, I love the format, the fact that we can go in and dig into what makes a GLTF format this.

Sam Brace: Of course, I think we all are aware that this is not a web friendly format. I know you’re showing this in a web browser right now, but GLTF, GLTZ, 3D [00:15:00] formats are not web friendly by design.

Anthony Datu: Correct.

Sam Brace: But from what I, I know you could easily make this web friendly thanks to Cloudinary now.

Anthony Datu: Yes, so you can display your 3D objects using the product gallery widget as well as the AR view. I believe that we do have a AR view widget.

Sam Brace: Well, you can also change it into any type of image, right? So you can take to make it a PNG, a GIF, a JPEG, whatever you need it to be just from there.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. So, if I copied the the URL just by clicking this copy URL icon, and now I can, what I can do is I can use one of the formatting transformation. Now, mind you that this is a very high resolution image.

That’s why, and this is the first time that we’re generating it. That’s why [00:16:00] now that we do have the PNG format of that 3D model.

Sam Brace: Yeah, and there’s so many different types of transformations you can add to this of course too, because like we have an effect called camera, so e_camera, and we’ll show that later in this episode. But it’s where if you wanted to at a specific angle or a specific type of shot, then it allows for you to do that. Where let’s say that you were trying to show the soul of the. Converse and you said that’s what people wanna see, or maybe it’s the way it would look from the front rather than the side. You can play with those different angles, but still have it be completely web friendly. So you can be able to take that 3D model, use stills inside of the product gallery, and then even on top of that, as you said, you can display the 3D model by itself with our product gallery as well. So it’s, there’s lots of cool things that you’re able to do here, but pretty fast, pretty seamless.

Anthony Datu: Yes.

Sam Brace: So how did you make it all happen? So this is probably a good chance for us to take a look at the code. And I [00:17:00] think one thing that we were talking about yesterday that was very exciting was the fact that you wrote this all in Python, which of course is a language that many people use.

Anthony Datu: Correct. Yes. This is pure Python. I just basically use Blender class inheritance. So, if we go to the repo it’s just a one file of Python code. It’s 241 lines. Couldn’t get easier than that, so as many Python scripts, it starts with the the main statement, here.

So it jumps into register. So this is the register function. What it’ll do is [00:18:00] it will go through, it will loop through the array of classes that I define up above, right? So I do have the Cloudinary property class the panel and the operator, and it’ll register the to the Blender environment.

It’s under utils and register class. And it’ll also register my cld props or property that I custom define. So, if we go up to the code, so this is the cld property or the Cloudinary property where I define the cloud name, API key, upload presets. Public id and tags, [00:19:00] and that in turn gets used in the panel. So that panel is what creates the the UI that you saw earlier. So, when I inherited the the Blender type panel class and I define the draw, it will get called in the Blender and it will render that that panel with the API key, the layout, or the fields in that panel, and the upload button that you see down below.

What I did is I call the layout operator function, and I use the Cloudinary operator ID. This Cloudinary operator [00:20:00] ID is defined over here under the class Cloudinary operator.

Sam Brace: Got it.

Anthony Datu: So that label, the bl underscore label, that’s what gets labeled in the button.

Sam Brace: Now, one thing that I’m seeing here, cause if you’ve used Cloudinary before or you’ve listened to anything that we’ve put out before, we’re always talking about Cloud name, API Key and API Secret as the overall environment variables that you need to pass to be able to link Cloudinary to, let’s say your a ap, like essentially to your development environment or to a program or a plugin. But, I’m seeing there’s no API secret here. So, how does that work? And also why did you maybe get around that?

Anthony Datu: Yes. So what I defined here is an upload preset with unsigned upload. My thought process to this is [00:21:00] that let’s say that I am a 3D modeler that I work as a freelance or agency and they have subcontracted – an enterprise customer, a well known brand, subcontracted a 3D artist to create a 3D model. And this is one way for them to ask the 3D modeler to upload the 3D model that he or she created to their Cloudinary account without giving out the API secret. So unsigned upload will allow our customer to let an upload through their account without giving out the API secret.

Sam Brace: I think that’s huge. It’s something where that’s a real use case where if [00:22:00] you have a team that’s creating 3D content and you need them to just be able to quickly get things into their Cloudinary account, you don’t need to give them a user seat because they aren’t gonna be needing to upload it through the DAM interface or through the user interface by any means.

But, it’s just simply where we need to be able to pass it from their program of choice, and as we said, Blender is probably what they’ll be using. If not, they’re at least familiar with it, probably if they’re in the 3D space. So it’s, I think this was smart. I think it was really smart to do that.

Anthony Datu: Oh, thank you. Yeah, in addition to that so the plugin also allows you to tag the 3D model, which on the receiving end, if you’re the, if you’re the account owner, in Cloudinary, you should be able to see, or you should be able to search with the search tag.

Sam Brace: Let’s see that because you did tag something, we uploaded something. So is there a way we can pop over and take a [00:23:00] look at that?

Anthony Datu: Sure. Here this is the 3D model that we just uploaded. You can navigate to metadata data icon, and you can see the three tags that we defined. So if we head back to Blender real quick that matches our tags.

Sam Brace: And then if I know something about Cloudinary, I know that we have awesome search capabilities, so that’s where then if you need to find things like this through our search API or through the management console and have it where it’s showing it through the search, you could easily pull up everything that has, let’s say Chuck Taylor or Red Shoe, and it could be images, videos, or files like this.

Anthony Datu: Sure, yeah. Yeah. Let’s do a quick demo. Go. There you go.

Sam Brace: Yep. It’s nice and simple.

Jen Brissman: Yeah. And this is a really important feature because with e-commerce customers, they’re, they have a lot of [00:24:00] assets that they’re working with and tagging is really important. And of course for 3D, that goes right into the product gallery.

And this is an important use case. So I can’t imagine without the tags, it would be nearly as helpful of product that you’ve built. So awesome work there.

Anthony Datu: Thank you.

Sam Brace: The other thing I wanna unpackage here is the upload preset because as we mentioned, that’s one of the ways that you’re able to avoid having to deal with API secret details cause it’s an unsigned upload preset. But, is there a way that we could take a look at that inside of your console and explain like how that’s working within this overall upload.

Anthony Datu: Okay, let’s go through the settings.

Sam Brace: And as you can see, so all of our upload presets as Anthony’s gonna be showing, they’re gonna be inside of the setting section of your system. And then all you’ll have to go do is go to the upload section and then I’ll show you all of the presets you’ve created, including the one that Anthony’s gonna show here.[00:25:00]

Anthony Datu: Okay. I’m sorry about this.

Sam Brace: You’re good. It’s fine. Okay. Oh, there you go. Yeah.

Anthony Datu: Okay. Okay, let’s go to the upload preset. I believe I named it Blender 3D. Here we go. So if we come in there, and this is how I define an unsigned upload.

Sam Brace: So, really it’s just that simple. So it’s where you’ve defined the name, you said that you want it to be there.

And when I looked at it, I know that we are, we can analyze things quickly because we work at Cloudinary, but it’s where there’s not much else that you’ve added to this. It’s strictly saying, give it a name, state, it as unsigned and then you can pass it through, and that is indicating that as long as you have the right API key in cloud, then it knows that you’re probably authorized to use that upload preset.

Anthony Datu: Correct. And [00:26:00] the only thing that I added is just where to upload it what folder. They could be organized that way as well.

Sam Brace: Yeah, absolutely.

Jen Brissman: And so how are you allowing people to define public IDs? I noticed that you didn’t define that in the upload preset. So in Blender, is there a field for people to enter the public id? And that’s something they’d manually create?

Anthony Datu: That’s that’s correct. If we head back to Blender this is the public ID field that they can define.

Jen Brissman: And if they weren’t to put anything in that field and click upload, would Cloudinary just assign them a random 20 character public id? Or have you tried that or have you always put in a, have you always…

Anthony Datu: I always put in.

Jen Brissman: Yeah I bet, unless you’ve required it, my guess would be that you would get a random public id.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. Yeah.

Jen Brissman: Just a guess. We can test that later.

Sam Brace: But the good thing is that it like, [00:27:00] because you are defining the public id, and as we’ve showed, that’s essentially what we use as the file name for when we are doing some form of web delivery to it. You can make it whatever you need it to be. And also you can always change it later too. But if you’re saying just review the upload process, so Jen, to your point, like if we did randomize, you’re like, oops, I forgot that field. Then you can always go back and fix it later on.

Anthony Datu: Correct.

Sam Brace: That’s great. This is really great. So looking at this, Is there anything that’s also, that we haven’t touched upon? Like we were saying oh, I forgot to mention about this aspect of it or that aspect of it.

Anthony Datu: Yeah, being a dev support, one of the reason why I gravitated towards the GLTF format is that if we can go through the file system and go to the chuck_taylor_devjam.

Sam Brace: Okay. [00:28:00]

Anthony Datu: And list the files. We can see that there are three files. So, we do have the materials files. That will be the, what we can see basically the skin or the texture of the 3D. The GLTF file, actually, it’s just a simple JSON file. We can basically interrogate what is this 3D model is using as a material, right? We can see that it’s actually defined just a text.

Jen Brissman: And is the ability to inspect this JSON file the reason why you gravitated toward a GLTF file instead of a GLB binary file?

Anthony Datu: Yes. That’s that’s as simple as that. [00:29:00] It just, because I can interrogate more and I can readily understand in plain English what consists of the 3D object.

Jen Brissman: Yeah, and I think it’s super interesting if you pop open one of these files to look at the skin or the layers in the two dimensional view. I think it’s super interesting. I haven’t worked with 3D that much, and I’ve enjoyed getting to see this aspect of it. So these three files that we just saw in Anthony’s terminal, now we have it in his finder and wow that’s crazy. It blows my mind that’s the file that creates this awesome 3D object that we’ve been looking at for this episode.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. Correct. So I don’t know how the 3D model or application does it, but I know it works.

Jen Brissman: Yeah. Really cool.

Anthony Datu: Yeah.

Sam Brace: That is awesome. That is very awesome. And of course the final output for this thing is that we, you’ve built this amazing exporter to be able to link Blender and Cloudinary [00:30:00] together. But the nice thing that you’ve also done, at least I think it’s nice, is that people can access this today where I know that you have this available inside of the Blender market, so that way people can go ahead and easily add it on to their Blender instance and start using it. I think you only have it as like a dollar purchase, so hopefully it makes me a little bit of money on the side.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. Because of the type of account that I have in the Blender market I wasn’t allowed to publish it as $0.

Jen Brissman: You had to put a certain amount.

Anthony Datu: Yeah, I had to put a certain amount at the minimum.

Jen Brissman: Yeah.

Anthony Datu: But, I did link my GitHub repo they can download this repo and then load it from the preference add-on to the blender.

Jen Brissman: For free.

Sam Brace: That’s perfect. And look at that. You [00:31:00] have something for free. In my opinion. People should be able to pay a little bit of money for it. Buy Anthony a coffee. But I’ll show it real fast, so you guys can see it in the marketplace here, but, so this is the so Blender market, the indie market for Blender creators, and this is the overall exporter that we have here, that if you wanna be able to download this and use this right away. Similarly, if you wanna just be able to grab everything from the GitHub repo that’s available for you as well. And one thing that I liked that you also did here was that you have a link to a code sandbox that also shows off the 3D modeling that we have within the product gallery as well.

Anthony Datu: Oh yeah.

Sam Brace: This is being able to explain all those details on how you can have a workable 3D thing where you can move it around, you can tweak it. All the things that you’d wanna be able to do to the 3D model, but within Cloudinary product gallery. So lots of really cool things you provide here, Anthony.

Anthony Datu: Thank you. Yeah.

Jen Brissman: So Anthony, I had a question for you. We know why you built this and we know what pain points it addressed, [00:32:00] but, is this part of your typical work at Cloudinary or were you encouraged to do this by your team? Or is this something you did outside of work? Or was this just something you had the freedom to do as a dev support engineer at Cloudinary?

Anthony Datu: Partly because I do have a freedom to explore different ways of creating tools. But, I see more and more enterprise really large brand enterprise are looking into how would they have 3D objects in their in their e-commerce store.

I think it’s a little bit of both that, I think we need to have some sort of a tool to aid, or cater, our 3D artist.

Jen Brissman: Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah, that makes so much [00:33:00] sense. I just was impressed that this is something that you can do at Cloudinary as part of your job that might not have been in your job description when you first applied to Cloudinary.

You might not have known that you’d be making something like this, and it makes me excited to hear about what you might make in the future or what other people on your team might make in the future as a part of their work at Cloudinary.

Anthony Datu: Yeah. Many of our colleagues here at Cloudinary, they build tools.

So they we do have the media inspector, and I’m just one of the guys that, you know inspired by them.

Jen Brissman: Absolutely.

Anthony Datu: So it’s really cool.

Jen Brissman: Absolutely. And I know we have hackathons all the time at Cloudinary and there’s always a lot of innovation happening, so this seems like something that maybe could have come out of a hackathon or could have just been a project you were doing outside, but this is really awesome.

What a great way to help people.

Anthony Datu: Cool.

Sam Brace: I love it. I love it. Anthony, this has been wonderful to have you here and I think it’s great that we’re able to be able to have this [00:34:00] conversation to show these great links. And I think, Jen, you said it well, hopefully this is not the last time that we have Anthony on the program to be able to talk about the great work that he’s doing and the great work that our developer support engineers are doing as well. So keep up the great work, man.

Anthony Datu: Oh, thank you. Excellent. Jen, What’s your big takeaway from this? What stood out to you about what Anthony’s gone and done? I think just what I said that he was able to make this on probably company time is just really cool and inspiring to me.

Like when I, when I found out that he made this I had no idea, I, and I was I was just really happy that kind of work can happen at Cloudinary. But yeah, otherwise, I think we talked about a lot of the takeaways. What about you?

Sam Brace: To me, I think the thing that stood out for is exactly what Anthony was saying about enterprise moving more and more into the overall 3D space. We’re seeing so many customers, big and small [00:35:00] coming to us and saying, how do I work with 3D objects? Or how do I incorporate that into my e-commerce or into being able to show what this looks like within a certain room that would overlays like whatever it happens to be. And it’s where there’s probably a community of hundreds of thousands of 3D artists that are out there that are using Blender. So it’s where we have this now very clear path to say. If you need to be able to deliver this for web, we are seeing you and hearing you. And I think Anthony has really become the person to extend that branch to that community. So, I’m very excited by the work he’s done. I don’t think anybody maybe even realizes how powerful the work that you do is until it’s done. But, there’s a lot of power in what Anthony’s created here today.

Jen Brissman: Yeah. And when you think about it, 3D is so important as we move to online purchasing, you really need to be able to see a product at this point, a two-dimensional photo of a [00:36:00] shoe. I’m not gonna know what that looks like.

Like I wanna see every angle. I wanna see the inside. I wanna see the bottom I, and with 3D, I think companies can have a better. I don’t know. I’m sure there, there are major statistics about 3D and how that affects overall success of online and e-commerce. But, I think it’s gonna be something where going forward we don’t what am I trying to say? We always see 3D, like it’s gonna become the standard and I think there’s been a lot of innovation in this space in the last few years, as Anthony was saying. So, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this, and especially at Cloudinary.

Sam Brace: Yeah, and I think you, encapsulated the buyer persona pretty well is that there’s an expectation now where you’re not just showing me an image of something, maybe on a model or a nicely set studio and maybe a video of some people using it.

People want to be able to really see all of the angles for it as, as we showed [00:37:00] with the Converse, being able to see exactly what it would look like if I was able to. Flip it around and look at the soul and see how it looks from a turn angle to see what it looked like on your feet. Basically, it’s

Jen Brissman: Right.

Sam Brace: It’s where there’s a lot of benefits of being able to show something in a 3D space, and I think brands, developers, many people that are tied to websites and mobile apps, they’re starting to understand that power very well.

Jen Brissman: Yeah, the importance and how it can be tied to revenue. The ability to zoom in on the stitching of the Converse could be all someone needed to click the purchase button, so…

Sam Brace: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, one thing that I do wanna show you here, so as we’ve talked about with Anthony, that Cloudinary does work with 3D models very well, and one thing that we alluded to is that there’s many different file types. Of course. The one that we focused on in this episode is the GLTF format and when you take a look at this, you’ll see that there’s lots of different ways that you can play with this. See the different [00:38:00] types of angling, different types of effects you can apply, and our documentation team has even gone and created this nice little interactive demo that allows for you to go and play with the camera positioning of any particular 3D file.

Capture a shot. And then be able to see exactly what that would look like for getting camera angles of some of the stills that you can have within the 3D space. So definitely something that you wanna play with. Of course, we’ll have these in the show notes as well. And as we said at the very beginning of this overall episode, make sure you’re checking out DevJams in some of the past episodes that we’ve had.

So, all of those are gonna be available at cloudinary.com/podcasts, of course, also where you probably enjoy listening to podcasts as well, such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and other well-known places. On top of all of this, make sure that you are checking out our Cloudinary community.

That’s gonna be at community.cloudinary.com, and that’s where you can see we can have conversations, with other Cloudinary users about images, videos, 3D, [00:39:00] and other things that are essentially affecting the way that digital media and visual media is being consumed on the web, mobile, and other places. So Jen, final thoughts, anything else before we let our audience enjoy the rest of their day?

Jen Brissman: No, just thanks for joining us and this was a lot of fun. And Anthony, keep up the awesome work. I can’t wait to have you on DevJams again in the future.

Sam Brace: Absolutely. On behalf of everybody at Cloudinary, of course, from all of us that are working on this program, thank you for listening to DevJams and we hope to have you back to hear some more inspiring, innovative, and interesting conversations with developers that are pushing the boundaries of what digital media and visual media is today.

Take care. We’ll see you soon.