The Idea

The idea behind ​​the Cloud Viewer is quite old; I began thinking about it seven or eight years ago, when I first arrived at Allegorithmic. The idea came from a simple observation: people exchange Substance files, but can’t easily view them at any time. At that time, you had to install something like the Substance Player, which is a native software tool. It occurred to me then that current technology - at the time it was WebGL - was already sufficiently developed to the point that a solution might be found. I began working on it.

We soon had a functional prototype that made it possible to view very low-resolution materials. There was still no standard model of illumination, like PBR, so the materials didn’t look quite as good as today. Nevertheless, it was functional.

But to make it really work, we needed access to powerful machines in the cloud. At that time, we didn’t have access to a cloud provider capable of handling machines with powerful graphics cards. We also didn’t have a platform team to create it. So it remained a prototype for a long time.