3D model of Tape Box rendered with JSC 3D

Initially I thought being able view tape boxes as a 3D objects, while cool, was more or less a cute parlor trick unless there is a way to industrialize the conversion of 2D scans into 3d objects. The other thing I was curious about was if this class of 3D object could be rendered in a web page. Needing a stand alone program like Meshlab is far to clunky.

After looking at the sample I believe industrial strength conversion and web viewing are both possible. I did a deep dive on the files provided and discovered that both wavefront objects and material files are basically text under the covers. The material (MTL) file contains the pointers to the scanned images while the OBJ file describes the 3D object and where to put the images on the object. In my example I used individual JPEG files for each face. I did this for two reasons. First, it makes it possible to render on a web page using the java script library JSC3D. Second, it occurs to me that most scans made of tape boxes are individual files. This means they could be used as is, or at worst with a scripted conversion to rotate the image to match the box model. The file structure of both the object and material files is so simple that creation of the 3D objects could be accomplished with something as low tech as a shell script.

Iv'e included links to the JSC3D code and some excellant documentation of the Wavefront format at the bottome of the page.

Here's the tape box rendered with JSC3D: