Facebook 3D Posts was a feature on the

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

ing website

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

. It was first enabled on October 11, 2017 by introducing a new native 3D media type in Facebook

News Feed On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors ''syndicate'' a web feed, thereby allowing users to ''subscribe'' a channel to it by adding the feed ...

. Initially the users could only post 3D objects from

Oculus Medium Oculus Medium is a digital sculpting software that works with virtual reality headsets and 6DoF motion controllers. It is used to create and paint digital sculptures. Medium works only on Oculus Rift. It was released on December 5, 2016, followi ...

and marker drawings from Spaces directly to Facebook as fully interactive 3D objects. The feature was available for desktops and mobile phones that support the underlying

WebGL WebGL (Short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerate ...

API. On February 20, 2018 Facebook added support for the industry-standard

glTF glTF is a standard file format for three-dimensional scenes and models. A glTF file uses one of two possible file extensions: .gltf (JSON/ASCII) or .glb ( binary). Both .gltf and .glb files may reference external binary and texture resources. A ...

2.0 file format for Facebook 3D posts. This allowed artists and creators to share 3D content on Facebook from a variety of sources. To make 3D Posts glTF 2.0 compliant, the support for textures, lighting, and

physically based rendering Physically based rendering (PBR) is a computer graphics approach that seeks to render images in a way that models the flow of light in the real world. Many PBR pipelines aim to achieve photorealism. Feasible and quick approximations of the b ...

techniques was implemented. 3D posts also supported unlit workflows for

photogrammetry Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant ima ...

and stylized art. Facebook has since disallowed users from sharing 3D objects.

Creating 3D Posts

There were four ways to get a 3D asset to appear in a Facebook Post: * Drag and drop an asset into Facebook's Post composer and publish it. * Share a link to a web page that has Facebook Open Graph Sharing metadata tags. * Share a local asset on an Android device using Android's native Sharing action. * Create a 3D Post programmatically with the 3D Posts API.

Tools for authoring content

GLB files (binary form of glTF) were required to be loaded in Facebook 3D posts. These files could be obtained by converting from other files formats such as

FBX FBX (''Filmbox'') is a proprietary file format () developed by Kaydara and owned by Autodesk since 2006. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications. FBX is also part of Autodesk Gameware, a series of vid ...

or non-binary glTF. GLB files could also be directly exported from a variety of 3D editors, such as

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender container with a rotating me ...

, Vectary,

Autodesk 3ds Max Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max, is a professional 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. It is developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capab ...

(using

Verge3D Verge3D is a real-time renderer and a toolkit used for creating interactive 3D experiences running on websites. Overview Verge3D enables users to convert content from 3D modelling tools (Autodesk 3ds Max and Blender are currently supported) to ...

exporter),

Autodesk Maya Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya ( ), is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, originally developed by Alias and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for interac ...

, Modo, Microsoft

Paint 3D Paint 3D is a raster graphics and 3D computer graphics application which is a refresh of Microsoft Paint. It is one of several 3D modeling and 3D printing, printing applications (formatted under 3MF) introduced or improved with the Windows 10 Cre ...

, Substance Painter and others.

References

Facebook Social software Software features Computer-related introductions in 2017 {{web-software-stub