Announcing: OurBricks 3D API

[Jeff Terrace]

Hey folks,

I just wanted to introduce an API that we've been working on over at
OurBricks (http://ourbricks.com/). OurBricks is a site for sharing 3D
models and allows you to preview directly in your browser with WebGL.
We've been wanting to enable users to interact with the site through
an API, so we added a few simple methods.

Search - You can retrieve the most recent models uploaded to the site,
or search through the title, description and tags of models in our
database. The results are presented in JSON format.
Upload - If you have an API key (we currently giving these out on
request), you can upload to the site on behalf of a user after
authenticating with OAauth.

The documentation for our API is here:
https://github.com/ourbricks/ourbricks-api-examples/wiki/API-Documentation

We have a sample plugin for Blender that allows you to import and
export from OurBricks without leaving Blender:
https://github.com/ourbricks/ourbricks-blender
I think this plays onto the idea of having a universal API that all 3D
applications can speak.

While our API is very simple and doesn't achieve the end goal of the
REST 3D API group, I wanted to introduce it as a small first step.
Once this group comes up with a finalized proposal, we'll do our best
to adapt our API to comply.

Jeff

[Rémi Arnaud]

Thanks a lot for this documentation. I added this to the references links on
rest3d.org !

[Jeff Terrace]

Just wanted to share some updates we just made to our API.

We have exposed technical details about the models on our site to the
search API. You can also filter results based on these values.

Here are some examples of the new API search calls:

- Models with man in them that have less than 1500 triangles
http://ourbricks.com/api/search?q=man&num_triangles=*,1500
- All models with greater than 100 effects
http://ourbricks.com/api/search?q=*&num_effects=100,*
- All models with between 1000 and 2000 triangles
http://ourbricks.com/api/search?q=*&num_triangles=1000,2000
- All models with at least 1 texture and texture ram is less than 1MB:
http://ourbricks.com/api/search?q=*&num_textures=1,*&texture_ram=*,1048576

These values are all contained in the response as well:
https://github.com/ourbricks/ourbricks-api-examples/wiki/Technical-details

We're continuing to add more features like this, with the end goal of
having a really rich set of possibilities with our 3D REST API.
Feedback always welcome!

Jeff