In collaboration with Polycount, we launched a 3 week competition to challenge the community to create stunning, low-poly 3D dioramas of their favorite video games and use Sketchfab to display them.

There were over 250 forum threads, but only 3 were chosen to win some fantastic prizes, including Sketchfab Pro accounts, T-Shirts and a signature Polycount greentooth trophy in Gold, Silver and Bronze. The winners were picked by the community, with almost a thousand votes, and we’re proud to share the winning entries.

The response has blown us away, with sites like Kotaku and PC Gamer covering the competition and helping to expose such a talented community of artists. It’s a real honour for us to see our service in your hands.

Here are the winners, congratulations!

First Place

Octopus by Brenly

Second Place

Dark Souls: New Leaf by Crimson

Third Place

Skyrim by Glenatron

You can also find the top 20 entries below:

Bump / normal map

Normal mapping and bump mapping are techniques meant to achieve the same goal : deform the surface of an object. So why not use the same slot for both ? When uploading a texture, the material editor detects the color and automatically assigns the right type for you.

Face culling

Polygons located on a mesh have a front and a back side by default. Therefore, wherever you look at you can see something.
However, in some cases you may want to disable this characteristic by unchecking the material option “Double sided” and display only front faces, making the back side invisible.

You can use this option with transparent objects where back and front faces are drawn in a inpredictable order for example.

While it’s not realistic to draw only the front faces of a transparent object, it gives definitely a nicer result.

Check out Mestaty’s reddit alien for an alternative use of single sided rendering : outlining a model:

Our 6th Sketchfast modelling contest will happen this weekend! Get ready for the theme announcement tomorrow at noon (EST) here, and on our twitter and facebook channels. And clear your agenda!!

Sketchfast #6 is over, thanks to all the participants, we have some pretty fun entries! Votes are now open below until next Monday September 9th at noon (EST):

Here is an embedded gallery of the entries:

Thank you all for participating in Sketchfast #6: your best sculptfab! We are happy to announce that today we don’t have three but four winners, and no 3rd place! The two top entries got the same amount of votes, and then the two following ones as well :)

Without further ado, our winners:

1st place: 3D print of the entry + a Sketchfab PRO account for one year

Hessen Vitalis by JuanG3D

and Creepy imp by fringatoonstudios

2nd place: 3D print of the entry

Zombie by DennisH2010

and Sketchfast #6 final entry by Emar

Thank you all for the hard work you put into your entries, and see you soon for Sketchfast #7!

The talented team over at Skimlab are hard at work to make virtual sculpting easier and faster. There are some great models being created and now it’s got even better with the ability to upload your models directly to Sketchfab!

Here’s how to do it:

• Log into Skimlab.
• Create a model and save it.
• Go to ‘Home’ and click View on the model you want.
• Wait for the surfaces to compute and click ‘Upload to Sketchfab’
• Type in your Sketchfab API key (which will be stored for future uploads). You can find your key on your Sketchfab Dashboard.
  

Your model will show up on your Sketchfab account!

We had the pleasure to meet with Zancois Rice, a very talented artist who did the famous “Rock bust” featured below. We took the occasion to do a quick interview:

Interview with Zancois Rice, “Student of life” from Sketchfab on Vimeo.

The Rock Bust from Skyhandzan on Sketchfab.

Thank you Zan for being part of the Sketchfab community, and we can’t wait to see more of your work! For anyone else around NYC or Paris, always feel free to reach out for a chat :)

The wavefront format (.obj and .mtl) is one of is one of the most straightforward format for Sketchfab. But matching the materials and get the expected results is not always obvious.

Materials

Materials in a material wavefront file are directly related to a Sketchfab material.

newmtl material_0

Channels

A material contains one or more parameters. Some of them are supported by Sketchfab and can be directly bound from the wavefront format to Sketchfab’s material editor. Most of them accept either a color or a texture (prefixed withmap_).

Colors are Red-Green-Blue float values inside the range [0-1].
Accepted texture file formats are jpg, tiff, dds and png (for alpha transparency).

Diffuse

Kd 1 0 0
map_Kd diffuse.jpg

The diffuse color as in phong illumination model is the color of a lit object.

Specular Color

Ks 0 1 0
map_Ks specular.jpg

Color of the lighting highlights.

Shininess

Ns 42
map_Ns shininess.jpg

Specular shininess : the lower, the shinier. Texture should be greyscale levels of shininess.

Bump / Normal Map

map_bump bump.jpg
map_normal normal.png

Simulates lighting and make bump details on the surface of an object without actually modifying its shape. Accepts only textures used as bump (greyscale heightmap) or normal map (bluish texture).

Opacity

d 1
map_d transp.png

Makes an object transparent. Overlapping transparent surfaces should be split into different objects for better results. More details about this here.

Emission

Ka 0 0 0
map_Ka ambient.jpg

Colorizes and textures an object disregarding lights.

Notes

Currently objects sharing the same material are merged into one object.
Also duplicate materials (which have the same values) are merged into one material. This behaviour could cause difficulties making separate objects, and will be reworked soon.

For more info and demos on how to use our material editor, you can check this blog post.

I’ve been a full time engineer at Sketchfab for about a month now, improving how we handle 3D assets and supporting new 3D file formats. 

When I was young, a friend of mine lent me a Playstation 1 with Die Hard Trilogy and I remember hearing my father say to my mom “Look honey, this is 3D, this is the future! We should buy the console.”. I don’t know if he really meant it or if was just an excuse to buy the stuff but it triggered something. I then started some applied mathematics studies and had the opportunity to carry out a Ph.D. in 3D, founded by the leading company in industrial CAD and trying to change the 3D modelling process by mimicking what we would do in the real world with clay. I discovered that 3D is such a huge world with so many aspects! And it is often really complicated. The theoretical aspects are hard but sometimes we could definitively do simpler. This is quite my motto as an engineer: making hard things seem easy.

I’ve seen some usability test where the user was asked to model her house in 3D and ended up with a completely flat model. I want to help people feel confortable with manipulating 3D and it starts with providing the best experience to visualize models. And maybe someday everyone will be able to create 3D but there’s still a long way to go…

And I think that Sketchfab has the right approach to make 3D more intuitive to everyone and bridging the gap between 3D professional and mass audience.

That’s funny because my thesis dissertation was about changing 3D modeling but I am not so much an artist myself. You know, always the same old shoemaker’s children story. The fact is that I simply lack some artistic talent. So I’ve been modeling with my own prototypes or with 3DVIA Shape or Sketchup but I wouldn’t show you the results of my sessions…

As a new dad, I spend a lot of time with my kid, wife and dog. Music has also an important place in my life, be it playing the guitar or the drums, (at least trying), discovering new bands or going to gigs. And I am trying to farm some fruits & vegetables on my appartement balcony which is quite challenging!

Favorite movie?

Movie with “real humans”: the big Lebowski for the inspirational way of living.

Animation movie: Up! So much emotions, this really is a masterpiece!

Diorama_up from abner on Sketchfab.

Karma To Burn, Wild Wonderful Purgatory. Slightly repetitive and heavy sound with no lyrics to stay focused.

Favorite model on sketchfab?

I think it would be the Octocat (below), I love the character and it is really cleverly designed!

Github Octocat from Mestaty on Sketchfab.

I’m (almost) 30. Was born in New Caledonia but grew up in different parts of France. I guess I should now be called a Parisian though. 

I’m assuming I have a little bit of time to enjoy my meal and that I should not worry about fat. So I would first drink a glass of Benriach Solstice 15. Dry of course, with a glass of fresh Chateldon water aside. I would then have a mix of green zebra and kumato tomatoes, with fresh basil, a fruity olive oil and, of course, a creamy burrata accompanied with a Peroni. I would continue with a raclette (I believe this should be the first reason for people to come visit France, not the Eiffel tower or the Champs Élysées); maybe I would take French fries instead of boiled potatoes and drink some Gewurtzraminer from the Herzog house (disclaimer: they are distant cousins). Then a trou normand to make some place for the desert which would definitively be a lemon pie *without* meringue (obviously) and a glass of fresh Huasa de Trequilemu. I realise my answer is a bit long but food is a very serious business, isn’t it? Finally coffee and I’ll be ready for whatever is coming after!

I did not join Sketchfab earlier. But I fixed that :)

I never had a single cavity and I know this makes my mom proud.

We are glad to release our exporter for Grasshopper! Special thanks to Andrew Heumann who did all the hard work, as well as the video tutorial available below.

Tutorial Example Model from heumann on Sketchfab.

You can download the exporter here. To install it, unzip the files, and move both the DLL and the GHA to the components folder. Remember to right click both files and choose “unblock.” The plug in will show up next time you start grasshopper.

You can then follow the step-by-step instructions below:

We can’t wait to see your Grasshopper creations, feel free to reach out anytime to support@sketchfab.com if you have any question related to this exporter!

Updated on Friday October 25th, noon EST

If you had to characterise our vision here in a sentence, one could say it is “to bring 3D to web.” And one of the area’s we think interactive 3D can have a really positive impact is architecture.

With that in mind, we recently teamed up with ArchDaily to sponsor a unique contest on their site. If you’re not familiar with them, ArchDaily is a great source of architectural content on the web. For the contest, participants were challenged to model their favorite architectural classic, with the top two winners receiving a 3D print of their entry courtesy of Gigabot.

We’d like to give a special congrats to the winners, and a thank you to everyone who put in the hard work and participated in the contest. The community was treated to some truly amazing architectural classics in 3D, 

First place - Villa Savoye, from Le Corbusier. Paris, France

VILLA SAVOYE from luizalense

Second Place - Lotus Temple, from Fariborz Sahba. New Delhi, India

3DPC_LotusTemple.stl from ElijahWood

A big thank you to everyone that participated in Sketchfast #7 this weekend! In just 3 short days we had 18 fantastic models entered, as you can see in the gallery below. This leaves the rest of you with some tough decisions to make :)

The official voting has begun - poll below. Please choose your 3 favorite creations, in no particular order. You have until next Monday 11/4 at noon to vote. Best of luck to all of the participants! 

An embedded gallery of the entries, which can also be found here:

A big thank you to all 18 of the participants in Sketchfast #7! We asked you to design your favorite video game character wearing a Halloween costume, and you did not disappoint :)

Many models were great, however there can only be three official winners. We closed the community voting this afternoon after one week, and the community has spoken with more than 100 votes. See below for the official results of Sketchfast #7, and thanks again for all of the hard work you put in! 

1st Place - A 3D printed trophy and one year of Sketchfab Pro

Mario the Hedgehog by GaryStorkamp

2nd Place - A 3D printed Trophy

Zelda Meets Hotline Miami by cesarcortes

3rd Place - One year of Sketchfab Pro

Claptrap by noirfx

Structure Sensor from Occipital on Sketchfab.

Sketchfab began as a small project 3 years ago, after Cedric (our CTO) worked on one of the very first demos of WebGL, for the launch of Firefox 4. He had been working for more than 12 years in the 3D space, talking on a daily basis with amazing 3D artists, and he experienced first hand how hard it was for them to share and promote their work. So he started building the best and easiest way to do so, in the form of a very simple web based 3D viewer. It has since grown to what you see today, a vibrant community of artists sharing their work. We will always be, first and foremost, a place for 3D artists - at large, makers - to get together and share their 3D creations online.

However, 3D is not easy; it’s a true skill, and why we call you artists. In short, not everyone can do it. So when a technology comes along that makes the process easier and allows anyone to create in 3D, its something we want to support and get behind.

3D scanning is a technology with vast potential, and a key to introducing this wonderful, three dimensional form of artistic expression to the digital masses. At the roots of it’s potential is the very simple fact that the world is in 3 dimensions: the ability to capture it this way is both a natural thing to desire, and something almost indistinguishable from magic, to paraphrase Clarke’s third law.

Courgette from MarkoV on Sketchfab.

And that is why we backed the Occipital Structure campaign. Their vision of bringing 3D scanning technology to the mobile space will allow anyone with an iPad to create a 3D model, in the process democratising 3D design. Imagine a world where you’re walking down the street, and notice a beautiful sculpture in the park. You take out your iPad with the Structure attached, and in a matter of minutes have a gorgeous 3D model of the artwork, uploaded to Sketchfab and ready to share with the world, or even 3D print at home. This big vision led to Structure becoming one of the top 6 most funded technology projects on Kickstarter.

Another reason why we backed the Structure is because Skanect is now part of Occipital. Skanect is a great software letting you leverage hardware with 3D sensors like the Kinect and turn them into a powerful 3D scanner. Skanect was the first 3D scanning software to add a “Publish to Sketchfab” feature in their interface, making the workflow from creation to publication as easy as possible, helping us to fulfil our vision. On top of that, both Occipital and Skanect are TechStars friends :)

Here’s an example of what can be done with #skanect, a color camera, and some serious 3D skills: http://t.co/E3e0L15VbS@Sketchfab

— Skanect (@Skanect)

November 5, 2013

It’s not just the Structure that is bringing 3D scanning to the everyday consumer. The opportunity is huge, and that’s the reason why many talented developers have been working on such technologies: just look at the number of (hugely successful) fundraising campaigns for 3D scanning devices over the past months: Fuel 3D, CadScan, Volumental, Lynx A just to name a few… Other software like 123D catch or PhotoScan are amazing too.

We are even seeing non-profits like CyArk utilise 3D scanning technology to digitally preserve national landmarks. And it was only two months ago that Fujifilm and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam publicly announced a partnership that would use 3D scanning to produce near perfect replicas of the paintings. The technology is everywhere! We see amazing mini-museums popping up on Sketchfab, displaying cultural heritage or archaeology with things from 17 million years ago:

Proconsul, 17 Milion years from anvesoft on Sketchfab.

What does it mean for 3D professionals who are today our power users? That you’ll be able to work faster, and focus on the parts requiring more skills, creativity and talent. You will spend less time on the initial basic mesh if you can get it from a scanner, and more time where your real added value is: texturing, optimising, rigging, animating…  The zucchini above is a good example of that. To put it differently, photography didn’t kill painting. It also means a wider demand for those skills, as more people get to better understand the underlying concepts of 3D modelling. You may have noticed more and more scans are uploaded to Sketchfab. We do agree that not all of them are great, and artists’ work shall prevail over those. We are working on a better filtering feature in order to push the best models to the top, and make poorer models less visible.

So that folks is why we backed the Structure campaign, and why we are so excited about 3D scanning. Our vision is to bring 3D to the web. SketchUp’s moto when they started was “3D for everyone”. We believe 3D for everyone means easy 3D creation, and easy 3D publication. Structure is boosting the 1st part of this equation, and we are working hard to boost the second part. Our V2 is coming soon, to better serve this vision. 

Hey everyone!

As you know, we’re always looking for ways to make it easier for our artists to share their 3D creations online. And in that pursuit, we have some great news to share with you today - Sketchfab is now integrated with ALLYOU.net, a beautiful online portfolio service!

We’re very excited to be partnering with these guys. They have gorgeous templates to help you show off your 3D work, and the integration makes it incredibly simple to embed your Sketchfab models there.

They’ve also made it very easy to use. All you’ll need is the URL of the Sketchfab model you want to embed, and voila! As you can see below, they’ve even allowed you to control certain functions of the viewer from their embed settings - really cool!

To kick things off, we asked a few artists to make example sites, so make sure to check out what Gary Lloyd,Maxence d’Aubigny and Shem Dawson put together - beautiful work!

We have some good news today: our friends down under at AIE have announced the winners of their Construct3D modeling competition! 

It all began back in June, when Brendan Bottomley, an instructor at AIE, approached us about adding the Academy to our list of school partners. Many of you may remember Brendan from his Octopus diorama, which came in first place in Polycounts VG Remix contest that we sponsored, and is now one of our top 3 most faved models ever.

It began a relationship that we hope will last for a long time. If you’re not familiar, AIE is a fantastic 3D design school in Australia, and is run by just overall awesome guys. 

We let them know that we’d be willing to sponsor a contest for their program, and we’re very happy they agreed. The theme, as you can imagine, was to construct something in 3D; the artists were encouraged to interpret that however they saw fit. All in all it was a big success, with 120 participants, and 90 final entries. Even the judges were rockstars, with artists from Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, Sony and EA lending their voices to the competition. 

Take a look below at the winners and runners up for the 5 categories - Prop, Environment, Character, Vehicle and Student only. It’s truly a celebration of amazing 3D art!

PROP

Winner - AK47 - Construct3D from CarlK3D

Runner Up - fire Extinguisher from Hannes Delbeke

ENVIRONMENT

Winner - Orange Sector Dam from joshvanzuylen

Runner Up - Kraken House from CharlieWilson

CHARACTER

Winner - Tedy + Beast from dlconcepts

Runner Up - Icarus from aaron.p.martin

VEHICLE

Winner - Tanks Construct3D from jacksteel

Runner Up - Pod Racer from trent.cabban on Sketchfab

STUDENT

Winner - Overkill - Construct3D from JustinKirkwood

Runner Up - Chainsaw from timvizesi

Thanks again to Brendan for organising such a great contest, and we hope to see you all next year for the 2014 edition!!

Many of you have been asking about setting up preset camera view points on your models. It’s a great feature and definitely on our roadmap, and we are working hard to deliver it soon.

In the mean time, the good news is that you can already do this using our iframe API! Basically, it lets you start or stop the viewer and define camera views, in order to trigger camera animations.

Below is a great example of this feature in use by LFX Studio (just hit the “load and start” button to launch the viewer):

Dear friends,

When we launched Sketchfab 18 months ago, our vision was to create a tool that would enable anyone to easily publish and embed 3D files online. We can say that today it has become much more than that. We are now a vibrant community of fantastic talents from widespread industries. The models you uploaded have travelled the web, showing it was possible to bring 3D content to a new audience, and establish it as a legitimate media format next to photos and videos. 

-Run, Dash, Spike.- Diorama from Yann on Sketchfab.

I’m thrilled to announce that we have just closed a new round of financing which will help us carry our vision to the next level, and become THE platform and community for 3D models on the web. We feel happy and proud to be partnering with such an amazing group of people who understand our vision, and who want to be part of it for the long run and help us grow.

This is great news; we’re still at the beginning and a long road lies ahead. It means we can continue building the best in-browser 3D viewing technology and platform. An interactive 3D viewer which is universal, fast, reliable, easy to use and faithful to the 3D content it displays. And ultimately, this is about you, and growing a passionate and talented community with an ecosystem of committed partners around it.

Amazon Prime Air Drone from Mestaty on Sketchfab.

Sketchfab wouldn’t exist without you guys, our users, who have uploaded your best work, helped refine our product and spread the word; thank you so much for being part of this adventure and sticking with us. You’ve really made it a reality.

I also want to give a personal thank you to my team: you’ve done a great job, and it’s an honour for me to be working with you. Our final thanks go to TechStars, WebFWD and LeCamping, the accelerators we went through, who helped us get to where we are now.

And stay tuned folks as we have quite a bit of exciting news ahead, including V2 of Sketchfab. It will mark the next major milestone in our product, and we can’t wait to unveil it to you!

Alban Denoyel

Co-founder & CEO

alban@sketchfab.com

A few weeks ago we started a blog post series on the Sketchfab team, and interviewed Marc. We are excited to now introduce you to Paul, who was the 1st to join the team!

Tk’s Face from Tuan Kuranes on Sketchfab.

How long have you been with Sketchfab? how did you heard about it? What’s your role here?

> I’ve been with Sketchfab since March 2013. I first heard about displaying 3D models using WebGL from a tweet from @trigrou, whome I was following for his osgjs c++ to js conversion. I was immediately interested. As part of my job, I was seeing the use of interactive 3D media on the desktop growing, but it was definitely missing in the online experience. Right now, I’m mainly working on WebGL and shader code, as well as 3D format conversions. 

> How did you get into 3D? what interests you most about 3D?
Wow, that was a long time ago. I got hooked on computers and programming very early (it was with the Thomson mo5 with a stylus), and saw a documentary on Pacific Data Images (which would later become Dreamworks); it showed its movies, specifically Chromosauraus.

I instantly thought that was what I wanted to do. A bit later, I saw Eurythmy, in 1989, and it was like an epiphany; it made me feel the simulation hypothesis. That broadened my view, and got me into following not only 3D but also AI, physics etc. It helped me to go further and see 3D as a door to simulation. To this day I have “world simulation feeling” glitches now and then, where I see the world around me as triangles, ray tracing and other shader light equations…

Do you do 3D modeling yourself? How would you get started?
> I do not do artistic modeling myself, but instead procedural modeling, where you code to get 3d shapes :) And for that, I would get started by reading geometric formulas. 

What do you do in your spare time?
> Reading - computer graphics & simulation websites and papers mostly, hacking based on those readings when I have extra spare time…  
Otherwise it’s some hiking and pastry cooking (My latest cooking obsession is trying to make a whole croquembouche, below).

Favorite movie?
> That would be Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and lately the TV series “The Wire”. I really do like SyFy & fantasy movies, but being a hardcore sf & fantasy book reader, it’s hard to get the level of depth that a book provides through a movie. To that note, I do particularly recommends all Ursula le Guin writings as she is my favorite author, sharing 1st place only with the author of A l’autre bout du Rêve, from whom I eagerly await more books. As for my favorite selection mechanism, I do abide by the “Bad book leaves the reader intact” rule.

What do you listen to while working? 
> I choose music carefully, as a “Mood Machine”. So when deep into coding, silence is the rule, otherwise voiceless jungle/trance rythm based music when doing grunt work, or groove and jazz for creative and thinking sessions. And when killing heiseinbugs, its time for “Die, die, by my hand” or similar heavy-metal *loving* songs like  ”Rage against the Machines” to be let out of their cave.

Favorite model on sketchfab?
> I have a lot of those, and each week adding a new one to my fav list. The one I really like is the Octopus:

VG remix_Octopus from brenly on Sketchfab.

As it really does ring a bell for me, from the days of portable video game console… The minimalist execution is really perfect, while also achieving emotion and impact with a very simple set of techniques. That’s art for you.

Where are you from? how old are you? 
> From Paris, France, and now in the south-west of France, near the Pyrénnées. I’m 36 years old, and the balding process has begun…

What would you have for your last meal on earth
> The perfect french cheese plate with at least roquefort, camembert, and a perfect red wine  

Craziest thing you’ve ever done
> Falling from a in a 800 meters cliff, in the Alps, near Grenoble, for a hang-gliding session would be on top. 

What are you most proud of
> Doing exactly what I like, which is working in my field of computer graphics and simulation.