In Museum Spotlight, we explore cultural institutions who are using 3D technology to bring new life to their collections. Aves 3D, is an online database for 3-D avian skeletal anatomy. They have recently started using Sketchfab to display their models, the most interesting of which is the dodo anatomy project, which they 3D scanned at the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa. Here’s their story…

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus), an extinct, giant flightless pigeon once endemic to the island of Mauritius, may arguably be the most widely known animal species to have gone extinct in human history. However, despite its prominence in popular culture, surprisingly little is known of the anatomy and biology of this animal. The dodo was extinct by 1693, less than one hundred years after the discovery and colonization of Mauritius by the Dutch.

There is not a single complete specimen that exists from 17th century collections, only a few fragments remain; a single desiccated head, a skull, a beak, and a foot. There are also a few genuine but often contradictory contemporary written accounts and drawings. It was not until the discovery of a mid-Holocene fossil concentration-Lagerstätte on Mauritius in 1865, the Mare aux Songes (MAS), that scientists, most notably Sir Richard Owen, were able to reconstruct the dodo’s skeletal anatomy by constructing composite, partially incomplete skeletons. Surprisingly, only few additions to our knowledge of dodo anatomy, paleoecology and extinction have been made since Owen’s 1866 seminal publication, a vast library of semi-popular works on the dodo notwithstanding.

Interactive scan of the Durban Natural Science Museum dodo as it is mounted in the museum, in an unnatural high stance:

Durban Dodo Skeleton - Museum Scan by Aves 3D on Sketchfab

The fossil discoveries made by barber and amateur naturalist Etienne Thirioux between 1899 and 1910 include some of the best dodo remains existing today, including the only complete skeleton known from a single bird (housed in the Natural History Museum in Port Louis, Mauritius), and another largely complete skeleton (housed in the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa). Sadly, Thirioux’s discoveries never received the attention they deserved. Our anatomical atlas of the Thirioux skeletons, produced using modern techniques such as 3D laser surface scanning, opens a new window into the life of this famous extinct bird.

Interactive scan of digitally remounted Durban dodo skeleton, based on careful anatomical analysis:

Durban Dodo Skeleton - Anatomically Correct Pose by Aves 3D on Sketchfab

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir number fifteen is the first complete, comprehensive treatise on dodo skeletal anatomy ever produced and only the third monograph on dodo skeletal anatomy; the last one dating from 150 years ago. It represents years of collaborative efforts from a large team of international scientists, with a substantial contribution from undergraduate student researchers in the 3-D laser surface scanning 3-D of the Thirioux skeletons.

Seven things we now know about the dodo

• Rather than being a large and clumsy bird destined for extinction, the dodo was perfectly adapted to its island home.
• Humans did not hunt the dodo to extinction; instead, rats and other introduced predators likely had a catastrophic effect on dodo eggs and young.
• The dodo went extinct in less than 100 years after the arrival of humans on Mauritius.
• The dodo had kneecaps, just like us.
• The large, hooked beak of the dodo was used to obtain food and was also a formidable a weapon.
• The robust limbs not only supported the bird’s weight, but enabled it to maneuver quickly in dense forest.
• The tiny wings, although useless for flight, were used for balance when moving at speed.

About the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Founded in 1940 by thirty-four paleontologists, the Society now has over 2,000 members representing professionals, students, artists, preparators, and others interested in VP. It is organized exclusively for educational and scientific purposes, with the object of advancing the science of vertebrate paleontology. The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (JVP) is the leading journal of professional vertebrate paleontology and the flagship publication of the Society. It was founded in 1980 by Dr. Jiri Zidek and publishes contributions on all aspects of vertebrate paleontology. Each year the Society of vertebrate Paleontology also supports the publication of a single major work as a Memoir.

Professor Leon Claessens: “The 3-D atlas represents the culmination of years of work on the exceptional fossils discovered by Etienne Thirioux more than a century ago. We are very pleased that we can finally share his nearly forgotten discoveries with scientists and the public around the globe, and are excited by the new investigations that it will hopefully inspire. There are so many outstanding questions about the dodo that we were not able to tackle before.” Claessens: “Being able to examine the skeleton of a single, individual dodo, truly allows us to grasp what an actual dodo looked like and how it must have operated in its island environment.”

For more information, feel free to contact Prof. Leon Claessens, via email.

What a fascinating story! If you are part of a cultural institution, get in touch with us at museums@sketchfab.com to set up your free business account and share your story.

-Nico

Sketchfab has long been a place for artists to publish and share their work. As a team, we love staff picking and sharing our favorite art each day and we often send each other models we find inspiring.

So we’re thrilled to announce that as of today, we’ve made this process of sharing your favorites easier. Anyone can now become a digital curator with Collections!

Folders allowed you to categorize your own work, Collections go a step further and let you easily gather and share work from other artists too.

How it works

See a model you like? Besides liking it, you can now also add it to a collection with the new ‘ADD TO’ button:

When you click it, you’re prompted to pick a collection to add it to, or create a new one. If you had folders before, you’ll see they have become collections you can grow:

If models are part of a Collection (or of more than one Collection), this will be shown on the Model page, making it easier to discover more related work:

Create as many as you like! Sort by theme, interest, WIP’s… here’s some collections our Masters have started to give you ideas

Explore awesome SciFi vehicles curated by Phil Gosch:

Sci-Fi Vehicles by Phil Gosch on Sketchfab

Or fantastical quests and adventures from theStoff:

Quests and Adventures by theStoff on Sketchfab

A better way to explore

We’ve heard that you want better ways to discover great new art on Sketchfab, and with so much being uploaded every day, we think Collections will really help!

Explore and discover new content by subject matter in the Collections dropdown menu ‘Explore’:

You can see what other people are interested in and subscribe to their collections to get updates. The updates will appear in your newsfeed, helping you discover relevant, interesting new content:

What’s next?

We’ll keep improving Collections as we see how you use them. So, give them a go and leave us your feedback in the comments below. Any questions? You’ll always find help in the Help Center.

We can’t wait to see what you curate!

- Bart

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with the newest, easiest 3D modeling app out there: Gravity Sketch!

Based on the simple act of sketching, “Gravity Sketch is on a mission to lower the barriers to 3D literacy.“ Pierre Paslier explains "Our team really believes that this 3D literacy is the key to the future for science, creativity and entertainment.”.

Here’s how it works:

This easy-to-use app allows you to turn ideas into 3D objects that can be shared on the web with Sketchfab and also 3D printed by Shapeways. It’s for students and teachers who want to illustrate their projects, kids who want to create their own toys and crafters who want to 3D print their creations.

As our CEO Alban put it: “As ways to consume 3D content are exploding with mega trends like VR, AR and 3D printing, there is a growing need for super easy ways to create 3D content. Gravity Sketch is beautifully answering that need, by offering a very intuitive way to sketch in 3D with a touch screen. We are very excited to get integrated in this great app as a publishing and sharing solution”.

Check out the Gravity Sketch gallery for inspiration, and download the app for your iPad from the App Store

Can’t wait to see what you create!

- Natalia

Sometimes small features updates can be a big deal to our community. One such example is our new background color picker. Instead of ‘hacking’ it by uploading a solid colored background image you can now, well, pick a color ;-). You now have three ways of setting up your scene’s background: with HDR environment maps, images and solid color. Read all about these options on our Help Center.

We always listen to your feature requests! Even if we can’t implement them right away, we’ll keep track of them and will count the number of such requests to see how important they are to you. So keep them coming and help us to continually improve Sketchfab.

As always you can find all our website changes in our website change log topic. (Pro-tip: subscribe to that thread to receive notifications with each update!).

- Bart

We got to spend the past two weeks on the west coast for Train Jam and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

It was really great meeting so many people! Thanks to all that came to our 3D Games Happy Hour that we hosted with Allegorithmic, creators of Substance Painter. We hope you enjoyed the tasty local draft beer we picked up and for those lucky few that received our custom Sketchfab mason jars. Enjoy!

#GDC16 thanx @Allegorithmic for awesome beer and @Sketchfab for a awesome glass! pic.twitter.com/G3k061MESr

— Hugh McCullom (@HughMcCullom)

March 18, 2016

Virtual Reality was everywhere at GDC this year. We had the chance to use Google Tiltbrush and Oculus Medium, two great tools for painting and drawing in 3D with very intuitive controls and precision. Trying them confirmed our vision that virtual reality will make 3D modeling widely accessible in the coming years.

The latest VR headsets are coming out very soon! We had the opportunity to try them all and we think you’re going to have a blast with them. We’re going to go more in depth on specific experiences next week, so keep an eye out.

Meta 2 by Virtual Studio on Sketchfab

If we didn’t get a chance to meet this year and you’d like to learn more about how to leverage Sketchfab’s 3D viewer for your games, check out our Games Page or get in touch with our gaming expert Michael Calvert. He’d love to see what you’re working on and help you promote your content with Sketchfab.

-The Sketchfab GDC crew

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

Hi everyone,

My name is Krzysztof Mikolajczyk and I’m originally from Poland.I’m a 3d modeller/texture/game artist in Vienna and am currently looking for a job. Six months ago I found an opportunity for interactive 3D models with Sketchfab. For many years I’ve work with 3DS Max. I’m here today to talk a bit about the creation process of one of my uploads to Sketchfab, an accident in the gallery!

How did I start?

I start with 3d work once I get an idea. The next step is to look for reference images. After that I make some sketches. But in this case it was different. I tested a voxel program of my school friend, who develops it with Unity and I created some basic animal models.

I never created a voxel model before this and I decided to make a 3d scene with these objects. The next step was to include a mini story in this scene. Is it possible that a butterfly can beat a lion? - Yes! In 3ds Max I built a simple scene with a wall and floor. After that I created 3 pictures with the animals. The lion object I split in 22 parts. For creating physical simulations I used MassFX Tool. When I was satisfied with the simulation result, I baked animation and without problems I could import the animation as an FBX-file to Sketchfab.

For texturing I used standard materials from 3ds max. I didn’t need unwrap for all objects because I played only with color values. Lighting and post processing effects from Sketchfab enable me to create a special atmosphere in the 3d scene. In this case I activated vignette, bloom and tone mapping effects Sketchfab gave me an big opportunity to show my models in their interactive viewer and I can find many inspiring works in this community. Another plus is the ability to embed your 3d interactive models into social media, so thanks for an awesome dynamic platform.

An accident in the gallery by km_3d on Sketchfab

Thanks for reading this and have fun with 3d on Sketchfab.

Thanks Krzysztof!

You can see more of Krzysztof’s work here on Sketchfab and on his Artstation.

- Bart

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Valve Software allowing game developers to embed their 3D game content on Steam, the leading digital marketplace and community for game developers.

How big is Steam exactly? In 2015, users purchased titles through Steam for around $3.5 billion representing 15% of the global PC game sales for the year [1] and as of February 2016 Steam roughly has 125 million active users with over 7,500 games[2]. So, they’re pretty big!

As of today, Sketchfab is the second integration on Steam after YouTube. Needless to say, we’re honored to be a part of the platform and excited to help the community interact with 3D content in a new way. Today there are hundreds of game studios and thousands of game developers and modders using Sketchfab to share their 3D game content online.

You can see Vermilion Wlad’s full set of DOTA 2 workshop armor on Steam Workshop.

How does it work?

If you don’t already have a free Sketchfab account, you’ll need to create one here. Then just upload your 3D model(s), and embed them by pasting a full Sketchfab model URL, which automatically turns into an embed:

Here are the full guides for each part of Steam:

• Steam Greenlight: A place where users can submit projects to help get voted into Steam’s marketplace.
• Steam Workshop: A place for user generated content and mods to be implemented into Steam games.
• Steam Community Discussions and Announcements: Where game developers can share ideas, news, and start discussions about their games with their audience.
• Steam Store: The leading digital marketplace for game related content. One note - the Steam Store is the one exception where you still need to use URL tags for an embed: [URL]http://sketchfab.com/models/1234567890[/URL].

Pro Tips

Link to Steam in your Sketchfab model description and add:

• What game it is for.
• A link to the Steam asset.
• What props this asset includes.

Here’s a great example:

Need more inspiration? Here’s some more great examples from game studios.

Tag your game content correctly

Tagging content is important because it helps your work get discovered. It also helps us find and promote you on Sketchfab and to gaming publications like Kotaku or Destructoid.

A good rule of thumb is to add a tag for the part of Steam you’re showing your work on and add a tag for full game name:

Here’s some common tags used for Steam:

• Steam Greenlight: steamgreenlight
• Steam Workshop: steamworkshop
• Steam Store: steamstore
• Dota 2: dota2
• Payday 2: payday2
• Dying light: dyinglight
• Killing Floor 2: killingfloor2

That’s it! Upload your model, add a description, add tags, and drop your full Sketchfab model URL on Steam to embed it. You can also read the official announcement on the Steam blog and find more tips in our Help Center.

If you have more questions regarding integrating your 3D content with Steam or want help marketing your game on Sketchfab, please get in touch. You can email me michael@sketchfab.com, tweet me @RAWRsoft, or message me on Skype at “RAWRsoftGames”.

Game on!

-Michael

[1] Steam Spy

[2] Steam on Wikipedia

Time flies when you’re having fun…and today we celebrate four years of Sketchfab! We’re constantly amazed at the work that you share. When we launched in 2012, we had a few early favorites:

Sketchfab legacy by alban on Sketchfab

The first upload, a minitel (now we have VR!) was quickly followed by hundreds more uploads! Though it would be several years before he joined our team, Bart’s announcement post on BlenderNation on March 30th, 2012 led to our first server crash from the overwhelming traffic!

From that first day to today thank you for inspiring us with the amazing art you upload and share! From art and animations to Virtual Reality, we’re honored to be your favorite way to share 3D.

Check out all of our (and your!) milestones:

Can’t wait to see what you create next. Cheers to the next four years!

Museums exist to celebrate the achievements of humanity. They collect, preserve and interpret artifacts of artistic, historical or scientific value, and make them available for public viewing. The transmission of culture to the people is thus a museum or cultural institutions’ raison d’etre; it is a social necessity.

In order to make cultural heritage accessible to everyone, many museums and cultural institutions are free, receive grants from governments or donations from private donors. In museums quest to spread knowledge, they have made replicas of collections (either in plaster, using photography or more recently via 3D capture) for educational and preservational purposes. Today, these 3D assets can now be leveraged in many other ways.

As 3D capture has become more widely available, we made it easy for museums to use Sketchfab to share their collections. As a result, over 200 cultural institutions have joined Sketchfab over the past few months. They’ve collectively uploaded more than 3,500 models, resulting in more than half a million visits (that we know of)! These numbers are growing fast every day, underscoring the will of cultural institutions to leverage 3D as part of their digital strategy. We continue to support the important work of museums by sponsoring museum accounts with free business licenses.

Why Sketchfab for Museums?

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

The English idiom has it that “an image of a subject conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a description does”. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, what about an interactive 3D capture?

An interactive 3D capture is a virtual representation of a physical object that you can see from every angle on your computer or smartphone. It means that you can manipulate a 3D object, which helps in learning and understanding. On Sketchfab, it is even possible to display animated 3D captures and to add annotations to highlight specific details, making the experience even more interactive. The British Museum understood this advantage very well as it was the first leading museum to use Sketchfab. It now shares animated and annotated 3D captures of its collections weekly, such as this first animated 3D capture of the statue of A’a, one of the Pacific’s most famous sculptures:

Statue of A'a [animated] by The British Museum on Sketchfab

Social sharing makes it even more powerful; the statue was also shared on the British Museum page on Facebook:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive 3D capture must be worth a thousand pictures.

Sharing 3D captures during the earthquake in Taiwan

維冠大樓倒塌(Feb.7,2016, 15:00PM)(小範圍) by National Chang Kung University Museum on Sketchfab

Architecture is an important expression of cultural identity. As such, part of museums and cultural institutions’ role is to document both architectural marvels and changes over time to keep track of them in collective memory.

The National Chang Kung University Museum used drones to 3D capture the aftermath of the Taiwan Earthquake almost in real-time, a story that was covered in Mashable. Using drones to assess the damages to buildings is very powerful and helps raise worldwide awareness, as well as understanding the needs in a specific damaged area. This process was already used for the earthquake in Kathmandu and shows that the technology is now good enough for anyone to create, publish and easily share 3D content anywhere online.

Engaging new audiences through social media

Last September, the Van Gogh Museum shared an artistic 3D reproduction of a Van Gogh’s room on Facebook, resulting in a incredible 16k likes and 8.3k shares. This shows the power of innovative content and the ability of 3D interactive content to engage audiences. What’s even more exciting is that you can now have an immersive experience of Van Gogh’s room thanks to the Virtual Reality button in the viewer, just using a smartphone and a VR device such as the Google Cardboard.

Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the future of museums

While they preserve the past, museums are also searching for new ways to engage with the future, leveraging technology to make culture accessible and to reach new (and younger) audiences. We’re thrilled to see 3D content has now found a place in the strategy of these institutions, alongside photos, videos, and interactive audio tours. However, the physical variable has always been a barrier to scale these efforts. Until now, it wasn’t possible for a Brazilian citizen to discover the British Museum’s artefacts without being present on site. Time has also been an important barrier as the distressing example of the (destroyed) antique city of Palmyra in Syria, reminds us everyday.

While virtual experiences can never fully replace on-site experiences, they do allow an immersive approximation. Today it is possible to visit the Academy of Athens in Greece from China, fostering cross cultural interest and understanding of our shared cultural heritage.

The Academy of Athens by InDigital on Sketchfab

For a curator, VR also presents the elusive ideal: the ability to display each artifact in a perfect contextual environment, with perfect lighting. Imagine, as a visitor, if you could be alone with The Thinker, admiring him in the setting Rodin intended: his Parisian garden. Virtual Reality can take you there.

The question is not whether this will or will not happen, but how fast will museums will adapt and evolve. As the guardians of culture they have a huge role to play in this journey. VR experiences have the power to help museums develop new audiences and engage them in ways not previously possible. It is therefore crucial for museums to start creating 3D and VR content to build accessible experiences as a complement to on-site experiences. We’re proud to enable that at Sketchfab.

Join the flock!

In our effort to support culture, we offer free business licenses to museums and cultural institutions. The process is very simple: just create an account on Sketchfab and contact us at museums@sketchfab.com to request your free upgrade.

We have also started looking at ways to involve our community more to participate in cultural heritage and 3D digitization. We are glad to work with crowdsourced projects like Rekrei (formerly Project Mosul) and the Zamani Project. More and more members of our community are also helping to 3D scan and digitize Museums’ artefacts, like Thomas Flynn who is deeply involved with the 3D content production of the British Museum.

As long as museums continue to preserve and educate us about our past, Sketchfab will continue to support them. Explore all the cultural institutions on Sketchfab and let us know if there is more we could do! What role do you think museums play in our future?

-Nico

Gavin Goulden, our second Artist in Residence, is Lead Character Artist at Insomniac Games. When we invited him to do a sponsored project at Sketchfab and share his progress with our community he quickly came up with the following idea:

Essentially, I want to create a character that would fit into the world of Mad Max / Fallout / Rage with some blending of styles from things like Shadowrun and Destiny - not totally a rust covered character, and still embrace the colors.

In just a little over three weeks Gavin went from inspiration to sculpting the rough character and his clothes to retopologising the model and texturing it. And while he was doing it he was answering your questions!

His Work in Progress topic on our forum is one of the most viewed ones ever and it’s a goldmine of useful information to all CG artists.

Here’s Gavin’s final model:

Dust Pirate Final by Gavin Goulden on Sketchfab

Next up is Tor Frick, principal artist at MachineGames. Tor main expertise is hard surface modeling and he’ll be working on a mechanized sentry model.

You can browse all previous (and current) Artist in Residence topics here.

About the Sketchfab Artist in Residence Program

We love art at Sketchfab, and want to support art creation in any way we can. Sketchfab sponsors top CG artists to create new artworks, document their progress and educate our community. The program is invitation only, and candidates are carefully selected.

- Bart

The Virtual Boy is already a huge time waster at the Sketchfab offices

You need to know your history before you can move forward into the future. With that in mind, we’ve worked hard to support one of the first commercially available VR devices on the market: the Nintendo Virtual Boy.

Virtual Boy by Virtual Studio on Sketchfab

As with most features we launch, it’s still in beta. To activate, navigate to any Sketchfab model and hit the following sequence on your keyboard:

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter

Here’s a preview, recreated according to the Virtual Boy’s impressive specs:

Model: Steampunk Girl by Dmitry Grebenkov

If you don’t have a Virtual Boy yet, don’t worry! We have managed to purchase one hundred units and are giving them away for FREE! Just email us and include a motivation why you’d love to watch your Sketchfab models on your Virtual Boy.

Enjoy!

- Bart

With over 130 entries, we once again had an awesome collection of Easter Eggs for our egg painting challenge. They ranged from cute rabbits to flying skulls and (I kid you not) Daleggs from Doctor Who.

Remember that Shapeways is sponsoring 12 full-color 3D printed eggs for our winners, so let’s check out the 12 eggs that got the most votes from our team and the Shapeways community crew:

Easter Egg 2016 Winners by Bart on Sketchfab

Congratulations to our winners - I’ll be in touch with you later this week for your prizes :)

- Bart

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

Hey Sketchfabbers!

My name is Tiffany Chu and I’m a 3D games art student in my final year of studies at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games + Animation in Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Glade of Lunar Festivities was my entry for the 2016 Blizzard Student Art Contest. It’s also my second time ever making a hand-painted environment! (You can check out my first attempt at a hand-painted prop here in my Sketchfab portfolio).

The challenge was creating a full diorama from an original concept before the contest deadline. I only had two weeks during winter break to tackle this extracurricular project! Time was of the issue. I had to gather lots of good references and inspiration quickly and carefully plan out efficient UV layouts to save as much time as possible down the road in texturing.

First I visited the famous Huntington Gardens here in LA and took lots of photo references. Nothing beats seeing nature in person! I was especially inspired by the beautiful gingko trees in the Japanese garden area and their carpet of golden leaves. After I went home, I quickly doodled a sketch of how I’d want the diorama to be laid out. I also painted a few gingko leaves which I could later use all over my model.

The lunar new year was approaching in February and the story I wanted to tell was joyful and festive: lots of lights, red and gold tones for luck and prosperity, some spirits and liquor barrels and last but not least, Hozen shenanigans for the year of the monkey.

Since I knew what I wanted and being a pipeline of one I hit 3D right away. My workflow was:

Zbrush [sculpt] > Maya [retopo + UV] > 3D Coat [texture] > Photoshop [adjustments]

For the Hozen statues I wanted three similar ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ models in slightly different poses. First I made an extremely basic sculpt in Zbrush to get the rough shape. I then brought it into Maya and retopo-ed it into the low-poly style that the contest required.

To save time instead of rigging, I duplicated the first statue and separated the arms from the rest of the model so I could reposition them individually.* Essentially, this allowed me to reuse the same UVs on all three models by only remapping a small area around the shoulders that are unique shown above.

• No monkeys were harmed in the making of this project

Otherwise, I modeled the tree and other props entirely inside of Maya. The contest called for a diffuse/unlit art style so I decided to skip additional sculpting and bakes, and then using those as guides to painting over, because of time. I ended up painting all the textures for the bark from scratch as it was personally a faster workflow for me.

Finally I jumped into 3D Coat which was very easy and enjoyable to use. I could switch quickly to photoshop and paint layer by layer and save those out as separate maps. I was also able to import the leaves I created early as a stamp brush:

All that was left was uploading my model on Sketchfab to share with family, friends and followers!

Previously I’d go with sharing via Marmoset viewer but I’ve become a Sketchfab convert because of Sketchfab’s great embedding features. It makes it so much easier to share on places like facebook and tumblr with friends who may be not so familiar with 3D. Afterall what’s more eye-catching than scrolling to see a cool rotating model on your feed that all you need to do is click on? I’m also really looking forward to including animation in future projects which Sketchfab now supports.

[Pro tip: Sketchfab embed comes with an auto-rotate feature for instant turntable! Just check desired field in ‘show options’ of embedding under your model.]

Also, shout out to the great Sketchfab community. The comment system makes it easy to reply and get feedback on your models from other artists. Bart and the Sketchfab Community team work hard to promote Sketchfabbers on both the site and other CG publications. You guys rock.

Glade of Lunar Festivities by Tiffany Chu on Sketchfab

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks Tiffany!

You can see Tiffany’s work here on Sketchfab, ArtStation and Tumblr.

And thanks for your awesome compliment, Tiffany ;-)

- Bart

You need to know your history before you can move forward into the future. With that in mind, we’ve worked hard to support one of the first commercially available VR devices on the market: the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Virtual Boy by Virtual Studio on Sketchfab As with most features we launch, it’s still in beta. […]

The post Our Next Step in VR Gaming: Sketchfab Announces Virtual Boy Support appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

With over 130 entries, we once again had an awesome collection of Easter Eggs for our egg painting challenge. They ranged from cute rabbits to flying skulls and (I kid you not) Daleggs from Doctor Who. Remember that Shapeways is sponsoring 12 full-color 3D printed eggs for our winners, so let’s check out the 12 […]

The post Easter Eggs 2016 – The Winners appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs. Hey Sketchfabbers! My name is Tiffany Chu and I’m a 3D games art student in my final year of studies at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games + Animation in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Glade of Lunar Festivities was my entry […]

The post Art Spotlight: Glade of Lunar Festivities appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

Hi all, We’ve been working with several partners to host a weekend Virtual Reality (VR) jam at our office in New York and globally online via Itch.io. VRJAM16 is happening the weekend of April 15-17th 2016. Since this is the same weekend as Ludum Dare, we’re going to do the same theme, but only VR […]

The post Join us for VR JAM 2016 appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

HDR environment maps are an amazing way to light your scene, and PBR workflows actually require them. We provide a long list of environments for free. PRO and Business members can upload their own maps too. But what exactly is a HDR environment map? And how can you create your own? Greg Zaal has been in […]

The post How to Create Your Own HDR Environment Maps appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

First off, congrats to the winners for last month theme “Awesome Karts”! 3rd Place: @essimoon2 The Wind Wa-KART! by essimoon on Sketchfab   2nd Place: @lorenzodom SpeedPunk by lorenzodom on Sketchfab   1st Place: @d-3 MAD KART by patrickd3 on Sketchfab   There were a ton of great submissions, you can see them all here. […]

The post Unity Community Art Challenge: April 2016 appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs. Hello guys! My name is Juan Puerta and I am Spanish Character artist, currently working at Good Game Studios in Hamburg (Germany). You can check more of my stuff on my Artstation. I’ve been doing 3d design for about 12 years […]

The post Art Spotlight: Wolf Guy appeared first on Sketchfab Blog.