Viewer

The Viewer is a much simpler version of NDunes, that only enables you to open scenes made by the Builder (regular NDunes) and navigate through them. NDunes Viewer is a way to offer a complete 3D-experience, instead of renders and films of your scene.

Making a Viewer build

In NDunes Builder : when your scene is ready and you want to share it as is, you can make a viewer build by clicking on File > Make Viewer Build.

Everything that is visible in your scene will be visible in the viewer. If some of your objects are hidden, they will be hidden in the viewer. The cameras and overlays can be exported and the user will choose which ones to apply. Settings, tonemappings, scene Global Illumination... everything is exported so make sure to setup your scene completely. It is not possible to export City and Network in draft mode, but waterbodies can be exported in draft mode for perfomances purposes if needed.

Create a new folder or select an existing one and click ok to save your Viewer build inside this folder. If the folder was not empty, all files it contained before will be deleted and overwritten by the Viewer build.

This folder is your viewer build. You can transfer it to anyone you want, and they will be able to open it with their NDunes Viewer. It is NOT a scene archive, so if you want to zip it for transfer, don't forget to tell the people opening it to unzip it or they will be unable to open it with their Viewer.

The store resources that you may have used to setup your scene are exported in a Viewer build (contrary to a Scene Archive). This means that the receiver of the Viewer build does not have to have the store resources to open the Viewer build. However, the receiver has to have a store account and to be logged in to visualize the store documents that are in the Viewer build.

Launch Viewer and open a scene

The Viewer is automatically installed with NDunes. You can find it in "C:\Program Files (x86)\NDunes\Win64\NDunesViewer" (or where you installed your NDunes setup). Double clic on it to launch the viewer.

To open a Viewer build, click on the "Open Viewer Build" button. Navigate to your viewer build folder and select it. You can only open a Viewer build with the viewer, you cannot open a regular working directory or a scene archive, even unzipped.

Once selected, the scene will automatically load and appear in your Viewer. You can start to navigate in the scene!

Viewer functionalities

The functionalities of the Viewer are very limited compared to NDunes as it is merely a visualization tool to provide a 3D experience. You cannot modify a scene using the Viewer.

The list of functionalities of the Viewer are :