Published models: guided tours, privacy settings and faster loading
Publish a model as public, unlisted or private, add tour cards that guide visitors through it, and share a page that holds up when a thousand people open it at once.
Who can see it
Publish now asks who the model is for:
- Public: in the library and in search.
- Unlisted: not listed anywhere, but anyone you send the link to can open it, and embeds work.
- Private: only you.
You can change your mind later without republishing. A company logo can sit at the top left of the published view, linked to your own site.
Tour cards
A saved camera view can carry a card: a title, some text, links and pictures. In the viewer the views become a guided tour. Numbered pins sit on the model at the spot each card is about, and clicking one flies the camera there and opens its card. It is the difference between sending someone a model and walking them round it: "this is the kitchen extension, here is the supplier, here are the before photos".
A viewer for visitors
The viewer's controls are on a panel that slides out from the left, and visitors can:
- switch between Night, Sunrise, Noon and Sunset
- change the weather and the season
- set the walk speed, from a stroll to a drive
- turn the scene's sound on
Ambient occlusion is on by default, so the model has depth from the first frame. The author's name links to their other published projects. Towns built in Plotline are published as playable, and visitors can walk, fly and drive through them.
The library
The library scrolls without end, sorts by newest, oldest or relevance, and shows six square tiles to a row, with the title and author appearing on hover. A Play filter shows only the towns.
Built for a crowd
We tested a published page with a thousand visitors opening it at once. Most got through, but the page took around five seconds, the model over twenty, and a few requests were dropped. So:
- Pages are built once and served from the edge, near the visitor, instead of being rebuilt for every visit.
- Model data is cached for a minute at the edge, so a crowd does not all reach the database.
- A dropped connection is retried instead of showing an error.
- The furniture library is less than half the size: 854 MB down to 367 MB, with no visible change in side-by-side renders. Oversized pictures were scaled down and over-detailed meshes simplified where it does not show. The test room's download went from about 17 MB to about 10.5 MB.
A better loading picture
While a model loads, visitors now see a sharp, full-width picture of the exact view the viewer opens on, up to 2048 pixels wide. Previously they saw a small square thumbnail stretched across the window. The picture is taken automatically the first time you, the author, open your own published model and let it settle. If you publish again or change the look, it is taken again on your next visit.
And publishing no longer fails because a scene is too large. Anything that cannot be uploaded is left out, and the rest goes up.
Publish from the editor with 🌍 Publish to Library.