API for server-side 3D rendering

api 3d render server-side
Joshua Carmody picture Joshua Carmody · Sep 15, 2008 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

I'm working on an application that needs to quickly render simple 3D scenes on the server, and then return them as a JPEG via HTTP. Basically, I want to be able to simply include a dynamic 3D scene in an HTML page, by doing something like:

<img src="http://www.myserver.com/renderimage?scene=1&x=123&y=123&z=123">

My question is about what technologies to use to do the rendering. In a desktop application I would quite naturally use DirectX, but I'm afraid it might not be ideal for a server-side application that would be creating images for dozens or even hundreds of users in tandem. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is there a 3D API (preferably freely available) that would be ideal for this application? Is it better to write a software renderer from scratch?

My main concerns about using DirectX or OpenGL, is whether it will function well in a virtualized server environment, and whether it makes sense with typical server hardware (over which I have little control).

Answer

Paul Arden picture Paul Arden · Aug 12, 2009

RealityServer by mental images is designed to do precisely what is described here. More details are available on the product page (including a downloadable Developer Edition).

RealityServer docs

Related questions

Best 3D Java Engine

Looking for an easy to use 3D Java Engine API (i.e. not wrapper) that has a good community and good development. Extra features (i.e. audio, input, etc.) are not necessary but nice. List of the most popular Java 3…

Read More
No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource—when trying to get data from a REST API

I'm trying to fetch some data from the REST API of HP Alm. It works pretty well with a small curl script - I get my data. Now doing that with JavaScript, fetch and ES6 (more or less) seems to …

Read More
How do I make calls to a REST API using C#?

This is the code I have so far: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web; using System.Net; using System.IO; namespace ConsoleProgram { public class Class1 { …

Read More