I’m interested in this project. Sesotec
Specifically, how it was done.
It looks like perhaps the 3d scene was baked then imported into Playcanvas.
Interested in any insights as I’m very new to Playcanvas but experienced with 3d in general.
Thank you for any help.
James
Hi @jhill3d and welcome! Would you like to create a similar project for your own product? I think there are several ways to do this with PlayCanvas.
Yes. Identical to this one but with a different machine. I’m optimizing the cad data in 3dsmax now. I have a ton of questions being new to PlayCanvas.
Here are a few to get me started while I do tutorials…
What’s an ideal polycount for a whole scene? Better to have less objects or does it matter?
Better to bake the light into the textures before importing or do it all in PlayCanvas?
Can PlayCanvas particles travel along a path or be isolated inside a single 3d object?
Thank you for any help you can provide.
I think someone else here on the forum can answer these questions better than me. 
That really depends on the device you are running on, and you can’t set an isolated limit since polygons get shaded and run through a pixel shader before they get rendered. In trecent years even mobile devices can push a lot of polygons if there is room in the GPU budget.
So basically you will have to experiment on your end user devices.
Of course the less objects the better, but at the same time it depends on the kind of interactivity you would like to have in your scene.
For example if some model parts have to be moved those should be unique objects.
On the other hand if that’s not a requirement and much like the example project the model fits in the viewport most of the time, you can have a single object for it. No frustum culling (not rendering objects that are outside of the camera viewport) would be required in this case.
You can bake light into textures, that will improve performance but it can increase load time (it takes time to download lightmaps) and may also increase VRAM (video memory) allocation.
For the first problem PlayCanvas offers an alternative called runtime lightmaps which you can use to generate the lightmaps on runtime when you app first loads. Check this manual page for more:
https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/user-manual/graphics/lighting/runtime-lightmaps/
No PlayCanvas particles can’t travel along a path on their own, but you can add a particle system on an entity and move that entity on a path.
There is an option for particles to align to the movement vector, this way I think you can get what you are looking for.
Hope it’s of help.
VERY helpful. Thank you very much!
A good way to start is using the example project below. (You can use the fork option for this). Just add your own model and you have a solid base for your project.