Do you recommend use Unity 3D to make a Digital Catalog of products?

Getting Started
1

My team and I need to make a digital catalog for a company. This catalog will be very interactive with videos and 3d models. So, do you think that unity is a good tool for this?

2

I’m guessing a catalog would be most useful as a mobile-friendly web app. I would recommend using babylon JS for that specific purpose. Unity’s WebGL does not support mobile browser platforms. Actually, since you only really need to display videos and render 3d models, you don’t need babylon js. You probably just need some 3d viewing library and embed it into your web app.

I say mobile-friendly web app because I doubt people would want to download an application to be able to view a company’s catalog. Opening a URL is a different story.

3

I’ll take a look at this babylon.js, but the company wants the user to have offline access to the catalog and by desktop, so the user will have to download the catalog. Making it mobile and url accessible is not an option unfortunately.

4

With respect mate, most people have neither the time or inclination to read catalogues offline, it’s not like back in the 80s when people used to do “Mail Order” stuff from what they used to call “Club Books”, but of course in those days, the Internet as we know it hadn’t been invented yet.

5

Building out UIs in Unity is not as easy as building them out in a webpage or in a program that’s designed specifically for 2D UIs, so I think it would come down to the following:

  • Build it in Unity and work harder implementing the UI and adding Video playback.
  • Build it as a static website that users can download and open in their browser. Implementing the UI would be a lot easier, and you automatically support any device that has a web browser. It won’t be as performant as a native application, but if you’re just viewing 3d models you don’t need it to be that performant. Modern mobile phones are capable enough to do this in the browser.
  • Use a different tool to build out the UI, and Unity as a library to render the 3D models.

I think rendering the 3d models is going to be a small part of the work, and the actual design of the catalog and UI will be a much larger piece.

6

It depends on your resources I think? With UI Toolkit it’s certainly doable but it will take a lot of efforts.

You can also look at what Volvo has done:

7

for 3d models, what format you need to support?
will users add new models to the application?
Are those 3d models textured, optimized and made to look amazing, or just “raw” CAD models?
is it for Windows only?

UI would be bit difficult, if you want to have “standard” ui elements feel (like Office tools, Windows etc.)