Downloading 3D Models From Koru Cloud

Although Koru Cloud is a very convenient service to share your scenes online, it is not designed for long–term scenes hosting.

Starting from June 2022 the service doesn’t let you publish cloud scenes on your website or share them in any other way that may create significant traffic.

Koru Cloud is a service for show–casing your scenes and discussing them in small groups, so you need to self–host your scenes if you need more than that.

Before We Start

If you just want to upload a new scene, there is a nice server export tutorial that covers the process very well. This tutorial is for scenes that already uploaded to Koru Cloud and that you want to download back and host yourself.

Note that Koru gets evolved and supports more features with each new release. If you exported a scene long ago using the old version of Koru, consider upgrading your copy of the application and re–export the scene again. This way you get the most of the latest features and bugfixes in Koru. Use the tutorial below only if you don’t have access to the original scene.

Accessing Your Scenes

Every time you upload a scene to Koru Cloud you get a special “admin” link that lets you see the scene statistics and other information. You need at least one such link in order to access your scenes.

After opening the admin interface, you’ll see your scene parameters and the list of your other scenes below. This way you can browse all the scenes you have and delete the ones that you don’t need to simplify their management.

Downloading Scenes

There is a Download Scene button in the admin interface (see the top right corner of the page) that saves the scene as a ZIP file to your computer.

If you open the downloaded ZIP file, you’ll see a few files inside:

• index.html — the basic HTML template that you can use to see the scene;
• koru-X.Y.Z.js — a copy of Koru rendering engine used to display this scene;
• XXXXXXXXXXXX.koruDat — the 3D scene itself.

This is all you need to host and display your scene locally. Unpack the ZIP file to a folder on your computer, as the options below will not work for archived content.

Although there is an index.html file in the folder, you cannot simply open it with your browser, as browsers don’t support loading data files directly from disk. You need a web server in order to test the scene.

Checking The Scene

If you use Mac you probably have python programming language installed. Run Terminal app and navigate to the folder where you unpacked the ZIP file. Then run the following command:

python3 -m http.server 2000

You should see a confirmation that the server is running on port 2000, then you can open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:2000 to see the scene. Once done, stop the server by pressing Ctrl-C in the terminal window, or by just closing it.

If you don’t use Mac or the text above makes you scared, you can simply upload that folder to your webserver. Say if you have a website named https://www.company.com, you can create a subfolder named 3d there and upload the content of the ZIP file to that subfolder. Then you can access the scenes by using url https://www.company.com/3d/.

Embedding with IFRAMEs

You can then embed the scene to your website design exactly as you did with Koru Cloud using <iframe> HTML tag. Providing that you uploaded the scene using the instructions above, you can use this HTML code to embed the scene:

<iframe src="/3d/" width="800" height="600"></iframe>

or if you host scenes on a different domain (website), you can specify the full path to the scene:

<iframe src="https://www.company.com/3d/" width="800" height="600"></iframe>

From there it should work exactly the same way as it works with Koru Cloud.

If you need more control on the exported scene, consider exporting for server manually as there is much more export options there.

Downloading Multiple Scenes

If you use multiple Koru Cloud scenes on your website and linking them all with IFRAMEs, consider downloading all the scenes and extracting them to subfolders named after their ZIP files. You should end up with a set of folders with alpha–numeric names, each containing three files mentioned above: index.html, koru-x.y.js and a .koruDat file with the scene.

Now on your webserver you need to make a folder named scenes (any other name and path will work, just adjust the instructions below to match your path) and upload all the folders there.

The last step is to change your IFRAME src links from

<iframe src="https://koru.boxshot.com/scenes/xxxxxxxxx" width="800" height="600"></iframe>

to

<iframe src="https://www.company.com/scenes/xxxxxxxxx/" width="800" height="600"></iframe>

basically you change the domain name and add a forward slash at the end of the address, leaving everything else as is. If you used a different folder name for uploading, you might also need to change that, too.

Once Done

Once you uploaded the scene to your own website and made sure it works just fine, consider removing the cloud copy of the scene. This way we will not remind you about the scenes expiration again. Less emails to your inbox.

That’s All!

Here are some other tutorials you might find helpful:

• Single File Export — when you need a single HTML file containing everything;
• Export for Server — when you want to upload 3d models to your website;
• Export for WordPress — running a WordPress website? Have a look here;
• Koru Cloud — the easiest way to get your 3D scenes online in just a few clicks;