Supreme 3D with Teapotters

Are you a design major? Perhaps you just like creating three dimensions with your mouse. If either of these fit your profile, or you’re simply curious about 3D modeling, the launch of Teapotters occurred just days ago (Feb 1st, to be precise), and you might want to see what it’s about.

Like mine, your first take of Teapotters will be summed up in four words: What. Is. It. For? I mean, does the 3D modeling community share their work? Then it hit me.

Yes, Teapotters can surely be had for play. After all, having hours of work stored away on your hard disk and no one with which to share it isn’t exactly a winning combination. Uploading your design(s) up to Teapotters would be a logical step to get your stuff noticed.

But the target “demographic” of Teapotters isn't the dawdler wielding a premier mockup palette. Instead, it must be geared toward the professional space. That’s this guy’s impression of it, anyway.

Going back to something I asked earlier, if you’re a design major and maintain a blog (or plan to), you’d probably be very keen on getting to cataloguing your work in a portfolio that’s all you and nothing but you. If Blogger or Typepad is your software of choice, or you’re like tens of millions of other folks and maintain a page on Myspace, Teapotters allows you to embed your design in your personal web space. I foresee many companies and firms doing this very thing.

Now for the gripes.

I can understand the need to install a third-party plug-in to get Teapotters working. Unless you’re an ActiveX junkie and a Microsoft loyalist, in which case you can trawl Teapotters’ collection from the get-go. Firefox users will need to download an extension, but Mac users beware.

Like all OS X zealots, I was required to download a plug-in which enabled me to view the 3D presentations on Teapotters. That didn’t bother me in the slightest. What did is bug I encountered when sampling the 300+ designs present on the site. Instead of showing full color designs, I would be presented by an austere black model. Interestingly enough, only when I went to take a screenshot of the 3D design, the “shroud” would be removed, revealing the original, full-color design. Of course, this isn’t an issue I would take up with Teapotters. It is likely a glitch in the 3D Life Player itself, a product marketed by VirTools.

Other than the colorization issue I experienced, Teapotters looks like a winner in every possible way. The selection of compatible blogging software could be larger, but as Teapotters has been live for less than 100 hours, we’ll pardon this minor inconvenience. This might just be the easiest and best method for sharing and showcasing 3d designs on the Web to date.

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