It would be nice to have a web where you could open an sgf (by upload, text paste or link) and would display a rendering of the position on a nice goban with a beautiful background.

You could use it to build desktop backgrounds with your greatest moves, to open hard tsumego and read them in a nice setting or go over your dgs/ogs games.

I wonder if I'll ever have time to recover my 3d painting programming skills to make such an app.

Second Life Go Center
http://www.notabene-sl.com/slgc/

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"Alas, it is closed, as of 2012-Feb-03"

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Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
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The request reminded me of the banner at tasuki's tsumego page. He writes about how he made it and source files maybe available etc. See here: http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=faq

I meant something more like this goban but generated dynamically from an sgf.

Very interesting. That was rendered with Blender and Luxrender, both free open-source programs. Though it took 30 hours.

If you don't want a different camera angle, it might be possible to reduce that time by only re-rendering the board top and stones.

In any case, those two programs look to be programmable from python, so it seems possible to create a script that will do it!!

_________________
Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

Those scenes (in Blender or other) most probably represent the stone positions in 2D and map onto the board, which then gets rendered into 3D, with camera and light direction etc.

Parsing sgf to convert into 2D representation is not difficult. So, if you get the source of one of those scenes, then we could write a script that takes a sgf file and outputs the code snippet for stone coordinates in the expected format. Then you paste that into the scene source and render. But this probably can't be a web service as it requires too much computation time.

Have you seen this? http://www.voilamonsieur.com/products/u3dc/u3dc.html
It is not web-based, but instead of a static picture, it can replay the entire game on a 3D rendered board. You can take a screenshot at any move.

glGo has a 3D display option. I don't remember how pretty it was, but it's one quick and dirty option.

He also used to have a Go Screensaver that would replay games in 3D with beautiful boards and a lot of visualisation options. I still have it installed, but I think he stopped working on it.

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