Daniel Freedline is a fifteen year old highschool student from the United States. Together with his younger brother Alexander he created ‘Sunny the Bear’, a series of three ebooks for children of ages 3-7. The books link to 3D scanned objects to educate children on objects that they might otherwise never see:

As you saw in the conch shell [found in ‘Sunny Explores The Beach’, ed], many kids probably NEVER saw a conch shell before. In the story, the main character goes to the beach and finds many new and fun things. With Sketchfab, they can now learn about those objects in a very impactful way.They can even download the files and print their own toys, instead of spending a lot of money at the toy story.

Conch Shell by Sunny The 3D Bear on Sketchfab

The accompanying website also has a large and growing gallery of 3D scans (characters and scenery from each book), allowing kids to play with these objects on their computer or tablet. The 3D files are downloadable and can be printed, allowing kids to create their own toys.

Daniel was a finalist in a competition by the AWESOME FOUNDATION and his e-book series won the competition and the $1,000 prize! The panelists were impressed with his books, but also the incorporation of 3D technology.

His father Allan writes:

We can imagine a future where children no longer purchase printed books. Instead, they download the e-book, manipulate objects in 3D and print their own toys from their own 3D printers. Yes, it’s a few year’s away, but Sunny The Bear serves as an example of what the future can be!

You can download the first two books for free from the Sunny the Bear website. Go ahead, read them to your kids (I know I will) and let us know what you think!

Sand castle by Sunny The 3D Bear on Sketchfab

- Bart

This week’s 3DST topic is “Workplace”. Check out the details on the forum.

Sometimes an innocent request lands in your mailbox: ‘can you help judge the entries of the Unity Community Art Challenge?’. But boy was it HARD! Have a look at the amazing entries that the Unity community posted here on Sketchfab and I think you’ll agree ;-)

Together with the Unity team, we picked the following winners:

1st Place: bobbert234

A hat tip to one of my favorite iOS games, Monument Valley. Hello Ida!

Monument Ornament - UCAC4 - logo version by bobbert234 on Sketchfab

2nd Place: essimoon2

Explore essimoon’s model using the annotations that he added.

Wooden Christmas Ornament - Final - UCAC4 by essimoon on Sketchfab

3rd Place: dox

Santa brings Unity goodies! Lots of things to discover in this one.

Unity Community Art Challenge - UCAC4 by dox on Sketchfab

You can see the full list of entries for this contest in the Unity Community Art Challenge tag gallery.

Unity Community Art Challenge - January 2015 - Thor’s Hammer (Mjölnir)

This months Challenge is themed “Thor’s Hammer - “. We all have seen various depictions of Thor’s Hammer throughout comics and movies! Now is the time to let your creative juices flow and design a new look for “Mjolnir” (Thor’s Hammer). Use your imagination! Impress us with your creativity and imagination. Let’s see something new and fresh!

As a result we want to see a beautiful small Diorama/Turntable of your version of “Mjolnir”! If you aren’t familiar with the lore please check wikipedia.

See the full announcement over at the Unity forum. Enjoy!

- Bart

Today’s release contains a fresh new design for our galleries and a new email notification option. We also did a lot of work on an upcoming feature, read on for a sneak peek and a chance to get early access!

As we were adding more features to Sketchfab, we realized that our model cards were getting bloated. A redesign has created more space for the user’s name and avatar (usernames sometimes got truncated), and also to display a download counter icon (see it in action here).

We heard you when you told us we were sending you too many emails: we added a new option to the notifications settings page: you can choose not to receive a notification when someone you follow uploads a new model (this kind of ties in with the sneak peek below ;-)

Other changes:

• We increased the maximum file size for background images from 1MB to 4MB. Also, we fixed some potential issues with long filenames for background images.

Sneak peek: News feed

We’re REALLY excited about our upcoming news feed! We’re currently testing it with selected users and our head of development Pierre-Antoine lets me invite 25 members to help us with that. Are you curious and willing to take a hard look at the new page? Leave a comment and we’ll add you to the beta testers list :)

A few weeks ago I talked to Erwan Davisseau, professor of Video Games at UQAT in Montreal, Canada. Today we’re learning more about one of his students, Alexandre Bissonnette.

Hot Dog Truck by Lexington on Sketchfab

Could you introduce yourself to our readers: Who are you and where are you from? 

Hi! My name is Alexandre Bissonnette and I am a French Canadian from Montreal. I’m a university student at UQAT and I am studying 3D for video games. 

Can you tell us about what aspects of 3D you specialize in?

 I’m specialized into 3D modeling and texture for video games. I did a lot of realistic stuff in the last years but now, I prefer cartoon stuff and full optimised texture.

The THRONE by Lexington on Sketchfab

How did you first get started? What was that ‘I want to do this’ moment? 

I think that I always knew that 3D was for me. I remember when I was 12 years old and my teacher ask us to write on a piece of paper what job we want to do in the future, and I wrote «Create video games».

Do you have any academic training or are you self-taught?

Yes, I’m currently at my second year of university and I did 3 years of 3D creation at college.

What project(s) are you working on right now?

A lot of my projects on Sketchfab are personal work and a lot of experimental stuff but at the moment, I am working with my team on our video game for the Ubisoft contest.

Little Knight by Lexington on Sketchfab

Talk a little bit in detail about your favorite model you currently have posted on Sketchfab?

I think that my favorite is my Little Knight. It might not be the most complicated modelisation that I did but it’s the first one I posted on Sketchfab and I think that it’s a good example of the universe of childhood. 

https://sketchfab.com/models/29ecc0c26a8942b6bad4365f053e5a9b

What would be your personal advice to someone getting started in 3D? 

My first advice is to always be creative and never stop drawing your ideas. My second is to keep the passion of 3D because if you are passionate by your work, you will never feel like working.

What are your thoughts on 3D printing, Are/Do you plan to work with it?

I think that 3D printing is a very great invention that will change our future. Personally, I never printed some of my work but we have a new 3D printer here at UQAT and I will try it soon.

Rocket by Lexington on Sketchfab

How did you come across Sketchfab and how does it helped with your project(s)?

I first use Sketchfab in my course with Erwan Davisseau. He’s using it to correct our works. Now, I put a lot of little personal projects and I like to work with Sketchfab because it’s pretty easy to use, very fast and more effective than a turnaround video.

What inspires you?

As I said earlier, my style was a lot more realistic in the past and now I am trying to explore a more cartoonish world. I always had been inspired by the naivety of childhood. I also thinking about the feeling I want to give with the final result. Most of the time, it turns around the nostalgia.

Thanks Alexandre!

- Bart

Paris Meetup: Thanks for coming!

Last night we had a joined meetup with the awesome 3D Hubs community. We dragged our own Makerbot printer to Numa (we love playing with tech and we’re actually a Hub too!) where around 60 people joined us for the evening.

We kicked off the event with a quick presentation about Sketchfab by Pierre-Antoine, followed by an overview of the state of affairs at 3D Hubs by their French community manager Julie Sillam. After that, we spent a few hours discussing 3D, 3D printing and having drinks. Good times :)

Are you living in Paris? Print something on our hub, come pick it up at our office on 39, Rue Beauregard and meet the team!

Next up: New York City

Our next meetup will be in NYC on January 15th. Our three founders will be there (Alban, Cédric and Pierre-Antoine), so be sure to join us! Please RSVP here.

- Bart

Community member Phil Nolan shows how to 3D scan objects using freely available tools. He starts off by taking a series of photos of a rock, and then runs it through Visual SFM and CMVS to build a point cloud. Finally, MeshLab reconstructs the rock’s surface into a regular mesh. He even shares his original collection of photographs if you want to follow along.

Here’s the result of Phil’s tutorial on Sketchfab:

Rock Video by philnolan3d on Sketchfab

Awesome work Phil, thanks for sharing!

- Bart

The new Cherry MX keyboard sparked my techno-lust with it’s red glowing keys - it’s this week’s top embed! I really like how the embed is integrated in the page design. Great job guys!

Here are some other embeds that we enjoyed:

• It was a sad week for freedom and we definitely felt it here in Paris. Artists around the world responded, including this popular model by antiheroe.
• CES in Las Vegas caused a flurry of press about the Fuel3D Scanify scanner. Mashable talks about 3D scans as the new selfie, while the British Independent and Bustle zoom on on, well, less honorable applications ;-)
• We this awesome Superman design on ArtStation.
• AtFAB design lets you explore their furniture designs with Sketchfab.
• Explore the inside of a CE Ford Ambulance.
• MakerPlane wants people to be able to build and fly their own safe airplanes. Here’s what their current version looks like.
• Mappable reconstructed part of the Rosetta comet’s surface using publicly available photographs from ESA.

That’s it for this week!

- Bart

This week’s 3DST topic is “Freedom”. Check out the details on the forum.

We’re looking for enthusiastic community members to help us host meetups in their area! You’ll find details on the forum.

Last week I noticed a tutorial by ‘data journalist’ Lorenz Matzat in which he showed how to quickly create a 3D map view of any location in the world. In my adaptation of his tutorial I’ll give you a step by step instruction on how to achieve this, starting from downloading the required tools to tweaking the materials on Sketchfab.

39, Rue Beauregard, Paris by Bart on Sketchfab

Downloading a map

To start off, head to OpenStreetMap.org and navigate to the area you want to export. Next, select the ‘Export’ option at the top of the screen. Exporting large areas will generate huge data files that may not display properly, so start small!

Fine-tune the exported part of the map with the ‘Manually select a different area’ option and change the selection rectangle. Click ‘Export’ to save the result.

The export will be saved as ‘map.osm’ and needs to be converted before you can load it into Sketchfab. For this task we’ll use the open source tool ‘OSM2World’. This is a Java application which runs on all systems that support Java. It is a ‘command line’ tool, so you’ll need to open a terminal to run it (I’ll explain how below).

Converting OSM files to .OBJ

Download OSM2World (select the file ‘OSM2World-latest-bin.zip’) and extracting the .zip archive. I just double-clicked the archive to have it unzip on my desktop.

Next, download the ‘example texture selection’ from the OSM2World download page. Unzip it, and place the textures directory along with the file texture_config.properties in the OSM2World directory that you unzipped above.

To run OSM2World, open a terminal:

• Windows: Press Win-R, enter ‘cmd’ (without the quotes) and press enter.
• OSX: Open Spotlight, enter ‘terminal’ and press enter.
• Linux: Linux has so many flavors that it’s hard to list them here, but I’m pretty sure you’ll know where to find a terminal on your system ;-)

In the terminal, navigate to the OSM2World directory. In my case:

cd Desktop/OSM2World-latest-bin

Now it’s time to do the actual conversion. First, drag the map.osm file that you downloaded earlier into the OSM2World directory. To run, OSM2World requires at least two parameters, -i to define the input file and -o to define the output file. For example:

./osm2world.sh -i map.osm -o map.obj

There are more options, please see the OSM2World wiki page for the full documentation.

Note: you may see some warnings during conversion, but in my experience you can ignore them.

Uploading the files to Sketchfab

I will now receive two files: map.obj with the geometry and map.obj.mtl with material definitions. Zip these together with the textures directory in a file and upload it to Sketchfab. You should now get something like this:

Cleaning up your model

Now you may see some objects that you don’t want or need. You can choose to either open the converted .obj file in your favorite 3D editing software, but you can also take the lazy way out by using the Sketchfab materials editor. Just double-click on any object that you’d like to remove from view, go to the Transparency tab and set the transparency all the way up to 100. It’s a bit of a hack, but it works ;-)

Fixing the trees

As I was using the texture_config.properties configuration file, OSM2World will also export some additional models like trees. It’s using tree ‘billboards’ (simplified models using texture maps), but I’ve found it doesn’t quite export the transparency right:

Fortunately, fixing this is easy on Sketchfab: switch to the the Sketchfab materials editor once again and double-click on one of the trees.

We need to tell Sketchfab to use the tree’s texture map as a transparency map too, so open the Transparency box and click on the texture icon. Select the right texturemap for your tree type:

• arbaro_tree_broad_leaved.png
• arbaro_tree_coniferous.png

After updating the transparency map, your trees should look fine:

Fixing wall shading

You may have noticed the walls of the buildings have some weird shading. You can’t fix this entirely on Sketchfab: switching to Shadeless will remove the shading but it will also make your map look flatter (I rather like that look for maps though).

Another approach is to import the OBJ file into a 3D tool and fix the normals on your models. Just loading the OBJ into Blender and uploading it with the bundled Sketchfab exporter add-on will already do this (be sure to remove any objects from your scene before importing though - especially the lamps).

Thanks for reading

So there you have it! You have now selected part of a map, exported it to a 3D file and published it to Sketchfab.

If you created your own OpenStreetMap export, please be sure to let us know in the comments!

- Bart

#67 - Angelina by Kids Creation Station on Sketchfab

New York based Kids Creation Station is creating magic for kids! Read on to learn more about their company, workflow and how they use Sketchfab in their process.

What does KCS do?

Kids Creation Station uses the latest 3D printing technology to turn children’s 2D drawings into 3D sculptures.

How did you get started and how many people are on your team?

Kids Creation Station is a venture we developed to introduce kids to 3D printing. Our mission at 3DP4E — 3D Printing for Everyone (parent company to KCS) is to make 3D printing and Digital Fabrication accessible to everyone and to empower through design, technology and entrepreneurism.

We got started back in January 2014 and the first thing we did was create 3dp4e.com, a one-stop site for all 3D printing & Digital Fabrication information with links to services, products and sources.

KCS is a natural extension of our mission. It allows kids to explore their creations in a new dimension and see their creativity made real and tangible. It also introduces children to 3D Printing Technology, to experience the wonder of creating a 3D object from their imagination, giving them an understanding and empowering them to work with this exciting new technology in the future.

To further our mission, in sync with KCS, we partnered with Children’s Museum of the Arts (here in NYC) for an exhibition entitled: Into the 3rd Dimension: 3D Printing for Young Artists. We took artworks from CMA’s permanent collection and created 3D printed replicas. The exhibition is still running and has been extended until February 28th.

Currently, we are team of six.

Legong Dancer by Kids Creation Station on Sketchfab

What does your workflow look like?

Our backend makes our workflow effortless. When an order gets placed, it’s assigned to a modeler, who brings the art to life. Once completed, the model is uploaded to our site where two things happen, a 3D rendering is created and the model is sent to print. The 3D sculpture is then shipped in an awesome diorama (there are 20 to choose from) that is pre-selected by the customer.

What do your customers say when they see the 3D prints?

Our customers are overjoyed with their prints! They can’t believe how identical it is to the drawings.

• “My daughter was incredulous when she opened her Christmas gift which included her original drawing and the Kids Creation Station 3D print. Her direct quote was ‘Mommy, I love it! This is the coolest thing ever.’ Thanks Kids Creation Station! My son is now asking when he can have one of HIS works printed too.” - Helen

• “Working with Kids Creation Station was fantastic. It was easy to upload the image and the results were truly magical. They did a great job with my goddaughter’s drawing - it came to life in such an extraordinary way. She and her parents over the moon about the sculpture, and so am I.” – Meryl

• "Kids Creation Station is the perfect gift. I surprised my girlfriend by having one of her drawings 3D printed and she was totally blown away. She said it was the best gift she ever received. This is definitely going to become a recurring gift!" - John

John’s testimonial inspired our “Better Than A Card Valentine’s Day Contest”! We want folks to share a drawing along with a story on Instagram with us and we will pick a winner to get a 3D print on us for Valentine’s! You can read more about it on our blog.

#35 - Fuzzy Monster by Kids Creation Station on Sketchfab

How are you using Sketchfab in your business?

Embedded within our site is the Sketchfab API. Part of our approach in designing the website was to give our users the ability to see a rendering of their 3D model before its produced. We see it as a great way to not only view the model, but to share it among family and friends. When researching, Sketchfab was the best for our site because of how easy it makes it for the user to share via email and social media and honestly, Sketchfab makes us cool.

And you make us cool! :) Thanks Carmen!

Check out the KCS Public Library for more examples of drawings and how they turned out in 3D.

Are you using Sketchfab for your business and would you like to be featured on our blog? Please contact bart@sketchfab.com!

This is our final post in the Sketchfab Rockstar series which focuses on how to reach a larger audience for your work on Sketchfab.

In this post, our we’re talking about some ‘growth hacking’ techniques to help you increase your audience.

Don’t forget to check out the other articles in the series too:

• Be an awesome artist
• Tell a great story
• Share some downloadable models
• Engage with the community
• Connect with the Press
• Audience hacking

A simple strategy can help you build an audience on Sketchfab and increase your number of followers, views and likes. Improve your “street cred” with other artists and potential recruiters.  It’s all about optimization and marketing. Get ready to hack your audience and become a 3D Rockstar!

Part 1: Optimize your model for discovery

Make sure your models are searchable

Visitors use keywords, tags and categories to find content on Sketchfab. You want to make sure that all 3 let as many users as possible find your content. For example, if you design a printable model of the Eiffel Tower, you can use smart keywords, tags and categories as shown below:

Separate yourself from the crowd

Your models have to catch the eye. You can play with materials and our “Instagram-like” filters to make them look beautiful. The “Take Screenshot” button in 3D settings allows you to edit the thumbnail of your models that will appear in search results. An image is worth a thousand words, so make sure they look perfect. Here is a good example:

Increase engagement

 You can use annotations to increase engagement and the time visitors spend on your model.  It’s a perfect way to give a “tour” to your audience! Here is the perfect example:

Part 2: Share your creations everywhere

Embeds

We have an extensive list of platforms where you can embed your interactive 3D models. By sharing your models on those platforms you will find new fans and multiply your views. In addition, artists who like your work will be encouraged to join Sketchfab and follow you. They want to be inspired by your next creations and won’t miss this opportunity.

Social networks

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great platforms to increase your audience.

Facebook and LinkedIn: You can post your creations on related groups:

• 3D modeling / game design:

                 - Facebook: LunchCrunch and Pixologic Zbrush

                 - LinkedIn: 3D modelers and designers

• 3D scanning

                - Facebook: 3D Scanning Users Group

                - LinkedIn: 3D scanning group

• 3D printing:

               - Facebook: 3D printing Club

               - LinkedIn: 3D printing group and 3D printing guild

 Twitter:

• Don’t forget to add your twitter handle in your Sketchfab profile settings. An @ mention will be automatically added to anyone sharing your work on Twitter.

• Simply share your work on Twitter, we’ll retweet the best

• An easy way to get attention is to add mentions and hastags. For examples mentioning a tool you have used. People will be able to find your content by searching for hashtags, and you may have the chance to be retweeted by a big brand you mention. Here is a good example:

Impressive 3D model of @TheRock! Click https://t.co/eblSMxdkdU#fastandthefurious7#3dmodeling#art

— Corentin Metgy (@cmetgy)

14 Janvier 2015

• If you share on Sketchfab a concept inspired by an existing game, or a scan of something or someone famous, check if they are on Twitter and share it with them: This is how Konami spotted the Chibi Gear solid diorama and shared it to their audience. It resulted in more than 70,000 views for the artist. Here is the Tweet:

Amazing chibi-sized diarama 3D creation based on scenes from #MGS by glenatron: http://t.co/KHA0TjRJwYpic.twitter.com/BjDpu3N2kB

— Konami (@Konami)

November 4, 2014

Collaboration and cross-promotion

Exactly as YouTube artists do, you can develop cross-promotion partnerships with other artists. If you both have a similar audience, why not combine your efforts? You can promote each other’s work and grow your mutual fan base. It’s a win-win situation, as you will both increase your visibility. Why not start today? You can find artists on Sketchfab, 3D art forums and in the social network groups above. You can also find Sketchfab users on Twitter by searching for “skfb”.

Pro tip: Add a custom background to make your models even more catchy. You can receive a free PRO account to do so, simply by inviting 5 friends on Sketchfab.

Good luck!

- Corentin

Win a romantic weekend with the Sketchfab Valentine 2015 contest!

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and of course we want to celebrate it in Sketchfab style! So design a 3D greeting for your secret (or not so secret) love and you could win $250 in cash for a romantic weekend.

You’re free to design anything you like, and to use any technique that you see fit. So feel free to submit 3D modeled or 3D scanned entries. You might also consider reviewing our Camera Effects to add some atmosphere to your work.

Valentine’s day by Maurice S. on Sketchfab

Rules

• Design a Valentine greeting using any technique you like.
• Submit your work before Thursday, February 12th, midnight CEST.
• You can submit as many entries are you like.
• Tag your entry with Valentine2015.
• Winners will be selected based on a combination of community popularity and voting by our own staff. Looking for ideas on increasing the number of views and votes on your model? Read our ‘Rockstar’ tutorials!
• Bonus points for making your design downloadable and for 3D printable designs ;)
• We will announce the winner on Friday, February 13th.

Prizes

• 1st place: $250 in cash, and one year of Sketchfab PRO
• 2nd place: 1 year of Sketchfab PRO
• 3rd place: 6 months of Sketchfab PRO

Any questions? Just leave a comment!

Have fun :)

- Bart

An amazing story this week was Michael Balzer who used 3D printing and Sketchfab to convince doctors of a new, noninvasive procedure to remove his wife’s tumor. It ended up saving her eyesight - it’s quite a read!

Other cool embeds that we saw were:

• Two great looking game projects on Kickstarter: Project Nexus 2 and Kôna.
• Double Action, ‘A stylish multiplayer action game’, features a new asset using Sketchfab on their homepage.
• smrtGRiPS offers bike grips that vibrate to guide you along your way. We found a Sketchfab embed on this Portuguese tech site.
• DroneDeploy illustrates their aerial capturing solution using a Sketchfab embed. (To see it, click on “Build your own Google Earth” and then “View 3D Model”).
• The Vietnamese site Smart Living presents their duneHD 102 mediaplayer.
• In the Art category, we really liked Disney Street Fighters by Ingrid Barrios, Dmitry Grebenkov’s Steampunk girl and the Fiat Punto GT by Karol Miklas.

That’s it for this week, keep the cool work coming!

- Bart

Marina by itSeez3D on Sketchfab

Our friends at itSeez3D have added full body scanning to their free 3D scanning app for iPad. ItSeez3D works with the Occipital Structure scanner is and REALLY easy and fast to use. The software has built-in upload to Sketchfab to sharing your scans is super easy!

We have a few Structure scanners here at Sketchfab and use them to scan people at any event we’re at. To apply for a free scan in New York, Paris or Amsterdam use the ‘Contact’ button on our 3D Selfie account.

Watch this video tutorial on the new feature to get started:

This week’s 3D Scanning Thursday topic is “Kitchen”. Check out the details on the forum.

New York Meetup report

15 people joined us for the meetup at the Sketchfab office in New York last week.

We started with a demo of our latest and upcoming features, including our autopilot mode and news feed.

We had the pleasure to welcome Jean-Baptise, the founder of jeanlouiscasquette.com, who share his story, presented his work with samples of his casquette rings, and how he was using Sketchfab to showcase that in 3D on his website and with his client.

The Caskate Brand JLC by Jean-Louis Casquette on Sketchfab

Melissa from Lumecluster was there as well, and offered us a beautiful printed version of the exclusive half mask she made for us, you can find it and download it for free here.

Lumecluster Dreamer Half Mask: Beacon by lumecluster on Sketchfab

We also made full body 3D selfies with the latest versions of itseez (see the full announcement here).

Our next meetup will be in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on Wednesday, February 18th. See you there!

- Bart

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hello everyone! My name is Michal, I’m from Poland. I’m working as a 3d environment artist, and I love low poly hand painted stuff. I’d like to write a bit about the inspiration, and the process of creating my scene Terminusoid, which you can see on this site.

Terminusoid by trzykropek on Sketchfab

In the beginning, back in 2009, there was a game called Machinarium by Amanita Design Studios. Machinarium is an awesome adventure game created in a post-apo steampunk world, with masterful hand painted graphic design. Its amazing atmosphere made me think: “I want to make a game like this”. I started to draw sketches and to look for more work in this mood. Then I came across the blog of Ian Mcque and his dieselpunk-style ships. That was it. I did doodles on a piece of paper, next I threw it on the scanner and added color and detail in the graphics program. Here is the result:

I started to build a prototype in Scirra Constuct. Unfortunately my programming gaps and lack of free time meant that I ended up only on two stages ( both of them you can see in my dev blog archive: terminusoid.blogspot.com) So a few years elapsed, I started to work on a full-time, and with the lack of free time I suspended the project completely.

In 2014, I discovered this awesome hand painted scene by Daniel van Leeuwen. It gave me the idea to resurrect the scene with the flying city in low poly 3D hand painted design. So I started to make a mesh in Modo.

I started from the simple meshes, gradually adding detail so that was the closest to concept. Next I UVmapped each one asset (ship, city, cliff, and dune) using atlas projection type. The rest is a manual tablet paint job, with using Modo paint tool. I don’t have stages with varying degrees of texture formation, so I only describe them. First, using big brush, in top view, I painted imitation of sand contaminated by the roofs of houses. The same with rocks and cliff. All shadows are hand painted, I dont used any baked AO light. I treat the model as a flat image, painted it from each sides.

Here is the final result, taken from Modo with texture flat shading:

I hope It’s not the end, and someday this article will be a part of “making of”, of a whole game. Thanks to everyone for the positive feedback, that encourages me to continue this work.

Today I’m talking to Abraham Brooks aka Black_Stormy, who is a freelance 3D modeler for indie games.

Garbage Truck by Black_Stormy on Sketchfab

Can you introduce yourself to the community? What’s your background?

Sure! Hi I’m Abraham Brookes a.k.a Black_Stormy. I’m a self taught 3D artist-cum-indie developer. I started by making maps for online indie games and went on to modelling when I found their asset libraries lacking. I also taught myself how to program, starting with web technologies and soon moving to C based languages for games. I’m Australian but I’m currently living in Toronto, Canada after travelling in South America for a year. Toronto has a thriving videogames industry and I’m hoping to break into it while I’m here.

What type of work do you do?

I am predominantly a 3D modeller and I like to focus on environments as opposed to single props. I model, unwrap, bake, texture, rig and animate all my own work as well as making environment textures and lighting and a bunch of other stuff. I have been aiming my freelance towards small indie studios with limited budgets as I can afford to offer my services cheaper than most.

Tell us a story about one of your Sketchfab models.

I often babysit my 6 year old niece, which usually consists of me making games and her giving a running commentary. She was the one who told me to put “pink dancey ladies” and the words “Let’s do it!” on my Dance Arcade Cabinet. She also came up with the name “Cool Dogs” to put on my Hotdog Stall, which was made as an art test for a zombie game. I also left a zombie apocalypse message to my girlfriend on the blackboard on the other side of that model. I like putting personal touches on my work and especially like seeing peoples reactions when they see a 3D shout-out made just for them.

Hotdog Stall by Black_Stormy on Sketchfab

Which tools do you use / what does you workflow look like?

I’ll usually make a highpoly with plenty of control loops in Blender, and then bake it down to a lowpoly mesh. Using control loops on the highpoly mesh means I get a nice normal bake with well defined edging, which gives the final product a more highpoly appearance. I have been using dDo to make a base texture with well defined material values, and then I use overlays or just paint textures on top for surface details. The sketchfab upload plugin for Blender is so awesome. I can upload a fully shadered model straight from Blender and see it on the site within seconds.

Which projects are you most proud of? Can you tell us a bit about them?

A while ago I found some awesome concept art for a Steampunk Portal Turret. I obsessively smashed out the model and it was one of my first models uploaded to Sketchfab. I even collaborated with a fellow indie friend to get it working in Portal, with custom audio in classic english timbre. You can check it out on youtube. My biggest project at the moment is Double Action: Boogaloo, which was Greenlit on Steam in 2014. It’s a ridiculously fun sourcemod all about being an awesome action movie star. I am working on it in my spare time, currently detailing the maps with new assets. I have also been working with Anarchy Arcade, a VR desktop replacement app designed by gamers for gamers. Besides these I have a slew of game prototypes made in Unity from which I plan to make some mobile games.

Steampunk Portal Turret by Black_Stormy on Sketchfab

What’s life as a freelance game artist like these days?

Kinda slow. I’m up against the big boys and I don’t have any formal education so I have to rely entirely on my portfolio for competitiveness in the market. But I have been able to work on some great indie projects with some great indie teams throughout 2014 and I’m looking forward to continuing that in the new year.

How does Sketchfab help you do your work?

Since I work online I am often sending pictures to clients to update them on the progress of the work. With Sketchfab and the Blender plugin I have been able to show them an entire model instantly for much better feedback and faster iteration. It’s also nice to be able to share my stuff with a community of game artists and enthusiasts. Sketchfab is such a great way to demo models I wrote a simple sketchfab gallery viewer for my portfolio.

Thanks Abe! Best of luck with your business!

Don’t forget to check out Abe’s profile on Sketchfab and his website!

- Bart