I thought my memory was failing me but I googled it and found this:
Scene illumination is a complex task requiring substantial processing power. Shapespark computes the lighting information only once, when the visualisation is first created. To save time the computation is automatically offloaded, using global illumination technology popular in state-of-the-art games to take advantage of cloud computing to do the hard work of rendering a requested scene as fast as it comes on the screen.
Has the plan changed? Shapespark seems to only allow local rendering as of now.
Yes, when we released the first Shapespark demo and the landing page the plan was to make the Shapespark editor a cloud based web application.
As we worked on it, we decided that a desktop application with an upload of finished scenes is a better option. There were several reasons for this change of plans:
Updating a model from a 3D modeling program running on a desktop and the editor running in a cloud makes the workflow less convenient, especially with slow uplink and large models.
Cloud rendering is quite expensive and we would need to pass this cost on to the user. Majority of 3D professionals have quite good hardware, so rendering locally allows to reduce the cost for them.
Many users like the fact that scenes can be opened locally without internet connection. An option to host the scenes on users’ own servers further reduces dependence on Shapespark infrastructure (for some project it is a requirement to use only own infrastructure).
We didn’t completely drop the plans to offer optional cloud rendering, but we don’t currently work on it.