That's one of the most awesome ideas I've ever heard on this board. For funsies and for practicality that might really wow some clients. Of course it would require delivering a small .exe file, I suppose, that may be a bit of a downer to some.
But wow that would rock.
I might spend some time looking in to this but the only draw back that I think you'll find is this:
Games use EXTREMELY low poly models and rely upon texture mapping to create the proper effect for Depth, Lighting, and Detail. CAD models typically rely on ACTUAL DETAIL being modeled in, so that there are all the points required for clash detection and dimension snapping that drawings require. Plus, most of us are drafters that think "If I'm going to draw it, I'm going to draw it right" probably, so chances are the model is accurate to a fault, for this case.
Have you ever seen some of the models used for popular games? I remember back in the day, I downloaded the models for Warcraft 3, a popular Realtime Strategy game, to see about using them for some funsies modeling/rendering practice years ago. Thought I might learn a thing or two about pro modeling. They were sooooo basic and soooooo plain that it was basically 10-second to make the model, and all time for quality was spend in Photoshop creating textures... not something I cared for learning/doing.
This will all matter because if you DO a walk through of your model for the client, there is a chance that the screen refresh rate will have to go down so low, for their computer to process it, that it might be very off putting and unwieldy. Thinking that it'd be measured in... SECONDS per FRAME, as opposed to frames-per-second.
Depending on the visual style of course.
Definitely worth a look though, I'm thinking. Could still be pretty awesome and useful.
