3D Java player.I wrote a kind of hybrid applet. It does not generate 3D animation at the run time. On the contrary Java applet just plays recorded 3D movies. Each picture (frame) is very much alike to the previous one. So I can compress this file very efficiently. I believe that it makes sense to use the applet with quite simple objects that consist of 50-300 polygons. The size of such record will be from 4K to 30K. The size of the applet is 16K. When viewing my site the applet is loaded on your local machine only once plus 4K for each rotating letter and 20K for more complex things.
Animated GIF.The most simple is to place animated gif on you page.The problem is that it takes a lot of space even for simples records of 5-20 frames.
VRML.You can also include VRML files to you page. It makes possible to use complicated 3D objects and spaces and to link them with other sites. But as far a I know you can't use VRML file as a part of your page. You should open it and navigate in the VR space. Moreover I do not know what is percent of browsers that support VRML.
3D Java viewer.There is also a way to generate 3D animation dynamically by Java applet. Visit http://www.bcpl.net/~eharlow/3d to see what I mean. The problem is that you need to download quite complex Java applet to see the simplest things. Performance questions are to be considered as well.
Take a look at some 3D samples
Download free sample pages and a set of rotation letters (A-Z).
You can easily insert animation to your page if you have any notion of HTML. You just need to copy from my samples all text inside <applet ... /applet> to your page and change some parameters.
Full list of parameters you can found here:
| Parameter | Type | Default value | Description |
| Data | string | null | Name of the file with data ("Arrows.gif") |
| DataURL | sting | null | Additional URL to find data file (obsolete) |
| Color_x | color* | gray | (x = 0,1,2 ...) Color of the object "x". Color_1 is used for second object. |
| Background | color* | gray | Background color of the applet. |
| Wallpaper | string | null | Image that will be used for filling background. |
| WPOriginX | int | 0 | Shift of the wallpaper |
| WPOriginY | int | 0 | Shift of the wallpaper |
| Text | string | null | Scrolling text |
| TextColor | color* | gray | Color of the text |
| TextSize | int | 12 | Font size |
| TextBefore | int | 0 | 0-text behind object, 1-text before object, 2-in turns |
| TextSpeed | int | 2 | Speed of the scrolling text. |
| TextStyle | string | plain | "plain","italic","bold","bold_italic" |
| TextAlign | string | top | "top","bottom","center" |
| TextY | int | 0 | Offset in pixels from the top, bottom of center |
| FontName | string | null | "helvetica","courier", so on |
| Sleep | int | 0 | 1-Animation does not start until user clicks applet. |
| Debug | int | 0 | 1-Information about speed in frames per second is printed. |
| Speed | int | 1 | Specify "n" to play frames with numbers 0,n,2n,3n. |
| FramesPerSecond | int | 30 | Applet tries to stabilize speed to the specified rate. |
| Magnify | double | 1 | You can change size of the object inside the applet by setting different value. |
| Rotate | double | 0 | Initial angle of the whole picture in the plane of screen. |
| RotateSpeed | double | 0 | Increment of the above angle per frame. |
| Copyright | string | Can not be changed or omitted.
Should be set to "(c) Danilo Kozub, 1996-1998" |
|
| Address | string | Can not be changed or omitted.
Should be set to "http://DanKozub.com e-mail:mail@DanKozub.com , tel: +38-0572-477676" |
|
| Registration | string | Can not be changed or omitted. Should be set to "Dan Kozub" or to the name of customer which ordered it. |
color* - All color can be constant or animated. A known bug : color is set as B,G,R.
Examples of constant color :
"145,124,12","red","green","blue","pink","orange","magenta","cyan","white","yellow","gray","grey","black","darkGray",
"lightGray"
Examples of animated color:
"gray|10|black|20" - gray changes to black during 10 frames, then black changes
to gray during 20 frames
you can also directly specify RGB values of animated color
"0,0,255|100|0,255,0|300"