Shiva3D vs Unity 3D vs other 3d engine for iPhone hi-res 3d model viewer

Question

I'm trying to port to the iPhone a realtime 3D visualization (be able to rotate and/or zoom in/out) of a 3d mesh with high-resolution textures (and hopefully materials, bump maps, shadows, and other degrees of realism). (The mesh itself has been optimized for lowpoly, but texture adds the details.)

All I need is basically a model viewer on the iPhone, with support for high-resolution realistic textures. Which 3D engine is best for this (or, should a 3D engine even be used)?

• I was originally considering just exporting discrete frame-by-frame renders for each of 360 degrees from a pivot at an angle to "simulate" being able to rotate the model in 3D, and then it's a matter of detecting user input (rotate left/right) to load the right frame image. Since I'd have the 3D model, it might make more sense to use the iPhone processor to render it.

Answer 1

The source code to my Molecules iPhone / iPad application, which renders 3-D molecular models with full touch rotation, scaling, and translation, is available under the BSD license, if you'd like to use that as a starting point. I don't re-render for various detail levels yet, but it's something I'm working on.

However, I don't use textures in that application. For an example of using textures in a model you can rotate, see this sample application I wrote based on Apple's PVRTextureLoader example. Using mip-mapped PVRTC-compressed textures, you can get a high degree of texture detail on your models.