AR View

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1

The web viewer is great on macOS, but on larger models - it fails on iPhone, as seen by this image

IMG_1752.PNG
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. When trying to load a web view URL, the iPhone will load to 99 percent, flash the screen, load to 99 percent a second time, and then display this error message.

I wrote into support from the Mac app about a similar issue with optimizing the texture PNG files to 2K JPEG files, as is shown on the internets. I am not sure if this is the issue, but for the same CAD model, when I export a USDZ file and try to open it directly with my iPhone, I get this error

IMG_1751.PNG
IMG_1751.PNG1125×2436 89.4 KB
.

My Design File:
Hop2Top.shapr (4.3 MB)

Any ideas why this is happening - I am all ears

2

It’s the iPhone’s memory limitation. Some models are too large for it to handle.

One workaround is to create a duplicate of the project, scale it down, also scale down the textures in Visualization.

The size is affected by the physical dimensions of the model, so the smaller it is, the better the chance is to be able to view it in AR. Once the AR is on, you can scale the model it up inside it.

3

From the research I have done on this issue, it has a lot to do with the polygon count and the size of the texture files. The USDZ file I create from this model has over 40 MB in texture files, which are 4k PNG files. Shrinking these files to 2k (2048 x 2048) JPEG files is generally considered a fix for this as it has a far lower memory footprint on the iPhone. Reducing polygons also helps.

Neither of these are options in the USDZ export feature, and I have (as of yet) been able to manually complete the texture file reduction and re-zipped the USDZ in a usable way. Perhaps an “Optimize for Mobile” option could be added to the USDZ file export feature in order to accomplish this?

4

Not impossible, but that would possibly mean multiple file creation (as you probably still want the higher res version for desktops), which would take more time too. We have a better long term solution in mind, I hope we can show something very cool later this yer.

5

For your information, I have confirmed that the issue is with the file size of the texture PNG files.

Recreate Solution

  1. Renamed my original 67.4 MB file to a .zip, and then extracted the zip file to a folder.
  2. Inside the 0 folder, I selected all texture files, then right-click for menu, and selected “Quick Actions/Convert Image”.
  3. Chose PNG file, Large format, Preserve Metadata was checked
  4. After conversion, I selected all of the original PNG files and deleted them. Then I removed the word “Large” from the ending of all of the remaining files so that file pathnames would be preserved.
  5. I dropped the entire folder (containing the .usdc and 0 folder) into Reality Converter (free download from Apple at AR Creation Tools - Augmented Reality - Apple Developer).
  6. File/Export the file, using texture compression, to a new file.
  7. Airdropped to my iPhone, and it rendered perfectly in the AR Quick Look app on the iPhone.

I thought the quality of the resulting 3D object was just as good, and the file size dropped from 67.4 MB to 40.6 MB

View the Files:
They are too big to upload to this chat, but I have them on a share if you would like to view them.
Original USDZ: https://privateemail.com/appsuite/#!&app=io.ox/files&folder=43&id=43/5
Manually Compressed USDZ: https://privateemail.com/appsuite/#!&app=io.ox/files&folder=43&id=43/4

Future:
I certainly appreciate that you have better ideas in the future, and it is good to hear that, but I would love to have the ability to optimize this from the app if at all possible until then. The operation is really not that hard to do, it is just time consuming to complete manually.