Case Study: Smithsonian Institution accelerates 3D web previews with RapidPipeline

Smithsonian Institution automates 3D previews with RapidPipeline, reducing models to 20,000 triangles

The Smithsonian Institution faced the challenge of making its massive, high-resolution 3D cultural heritage models fast and recognizable for online viewing. Manually reducing these complex models from millions of triangles to a usable 20,000 for web previews was a pain point that often compromised quality and recognizability at a large scale.

The institution integrated RapidPipeline into its Cook automation framework to reliably generate optimized "thumb quality" derivatives. This solution from RapidPipeline made the process more consistent and scalable, resulting in over 3,000 assets being generated from more than 500 data sets in 2025 with better quality and fewer failures.

Smithsonian Institution