[Webplayer] Runtime Collada load possible?

Hey folks. its my first time here so please be gentle

I'm currently evaluating unity as a possible fit for my clients needs. He runs a constructions company which sells around 40 big, really big machines to customers all over the world. He came to me and asked if we could do anything with the CAD data of his machines and I said: We could make a rotatable 3d model of them for your website in flash...

At that point neither he nor me knew that these modells would have around 50000 polygons. Thats a bit too much for flash to handle. That' why I'm here now.

The normal workflow in flash would be:
1. Setup mouse Events,
2. get path to the Collada file
3. Parse it
4. attach events to the container of the parsed collada file.

I've been searching for a similar behaviour in unity for around 4 hours. Not much success so far. I read about loading your DAE into your unity scene and compile it as static asset. But thats not what i am looking for. I'm searching for a way to load and parse the DAE at runtime to reduce server load if a user is just looking for a specific machine. No User would wants to load 40 models if he is just looking for one or two of them...

I hope this explains a bit what i'm after. I hope you can point me to the right tutorial or give me a few hints where i can find a sample project with this behaviour.

thanks in advance

Mike

 

Without implementing it yourself there is no loading support for external meshes.

 

If you can use .obj instead of .dae, then this will work. 50K polygons is pretty trivial in Unity, although there is a limit of about 65K vertices per mesh, which can be bypassed by splitting meshes over that limit into multiple parts. With Unity Pro, you can load asset bundles at runtime, which can include models that were imported into Unity. The models still have to pass through Unity, but the format doesn't matter (as long as you can get it into Unity at all) and you can load only the ones you want at runtime.

--Eric