How large of an image can I get using Project Freewheel?

Project Freewheel is our software as a service approach to viewing and collaboration using just a web browser. Think of it as Autodesk Design Review without the install. Or think of it as a way to view designs on the Macintosh, Linux, or cell phones. In addition to being an interactive viewer (pan, zoom, 3D orbit, etc.), Project Freewheel can be used to generate static images. The static images are just like GIFs or JPEGs that are traditionally used in conjunction with HTML. The advantage of using Project Freewheel to generate them is that when the design is updated, the image is regenerated. This allows companies to include designs on their company web sites and only need to update the designs but not touch their web sites for web site visitors to see the latest and greatest designs.

A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey writes in:

How large of an image can I generate with Project Freewheel?

Software Architect, Ben Cochran noted:

The Project Freewheel API that returns an image has an upper limit to the size of the image that it will compute. Since the number of pixels goes up by the square of the resolution, allowing people to increase the requested image width or height to large sizes can make the number of pixels Project Freewheel has to compute grow exponentially. When this happens, the Project Freewheel server requires very large amounts of RAM. To prevent malicious users from intentionally crashing Project Freewheel, we limit the amount of RAM any one image request can make. For Project Freewheel this value is 7,480,000 pixels. When exceeding this value on Project Freewheel, the caller of theAPI gets an “Error rendering DWF File” message.

Autodesk Labs VP, Brian Mathews, chimed in with an HTML page that provided some sample code. I have posted it to my blog:

Using Project Freewheel's parametric API to make tiled maps

Keep those questions coming in to labs.freewheel@autodesk.com. Helping clarify how design data can be viewed using just a web browser is alive in the lab.