The first thing we need to consider about how the solution should look like, is that we should be able to view CAD files just like we do that in CAD software on our PCs. In this work, we’d like to cover the 3D viewers, explain how they work and discuss how to utilize them best. This article can be of use for those who plan to have in a CAD viewer, or any other web-based 3D modelling plugin on their platform, or for anyone interested in how it all works. The GrabCAD users can use the search engine to find a CAD file of their interest by keywords or description, go through results by looking at rendered images of CAD models, and select the most suitable option among them for download. It allows not only to upload or download a CAD file, but also to preview it via either prerendered images or in the embedded 3D viewer. GrabCAD is a free online platform that allows sharing of CAD files in various formats among its 4 million users. For example, GrabCAD is a company that implemented web-based CAD viewers on their platform.

There are many applications for web-based CAD viewers, but most of them are of engineering nature. Viewers in general are much simpler packages than GMKs and CAD-systems, mostly because they allow using the CAD viewing features without having the CAD design features.

However, as we don’t want to bring the whole CAD system online and only want to view CAD models, we reduce the complexity of the problem enough to have already existing and working solutions. This is mainly due to absolute or partial inability of existing online approaches to perform complex computations with appropriate performance. Opening a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model within a web-based service can be more challenging than one could think.

Dwg viewer online free