Sketchfab news

Hi Blenderartists!

To make it easier to bring you announcements, we wanted to start an official Sketchfab thread here in the forums. Check here for news about Sketchfab contests, product updates, new tools etc.

Stay tuned, as we have a lot coming in the next weeks and months http://3dhit.co.uk/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.png.

The first bit of news is that we’re holding a Sketchfast fast modeling contest this weekend! We just announced the theme - model your favorite video game character, wearing a Halloween costume. We’re expecting some hilarious results come Monday…

Check out the blog post that we linked to up top for details, and have fun!

Best,

The Sketchfab team

Great stuff. Glad to know that a few folks tend to use initiative in the manner of things. All the best!

Thank you very much, hopefully we’ll see your work in the contest this weekend!

Entries are up and voting is now open! You can vote here on our blog.

Good luck to all the participants!

Hey guys - some great news, Sketchfab integration is back up and running here on BA! You can see our logo now in your text book tools, even in the quick reply :slight_smile:

Hey Blenderartists! We’re a little late, but wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays and new year from the entire Sketchfab team :slight_smile:

Hey everyone!

To celebrate our integration into Photoshop and the upcoming 3D Print Show here in NYC, we have put together a little challenge. Called “Printable Fine Art,” the idea, as you can imagine, is to make a beautiful model that is 3D-printable. The top 3 winners will have their work printed and displayed at the print show, as well as receive one year of Photoshop CC and Sketchfab Pro.

More details can be found here in our blogpost. We hope you’ll find this a fun contest, and definitely come see us at the show if you’ll be in New York!

Hey everyone,

To celebrate today’s debut of The Lego Movie we have put together a little challenge. Sketchfast #8 theme is : Design your own Lego character. The top 3 winners will receive 1 year of Pro membership on Sketchfab.com and/or a 3D printed miniature.

More details can be found in our blog post. We hope you’ll find this a fun contest :slight_smile:

Good luck everyone!

The Sketchfab team

SketchFab does not allow for either Cycles Materials or Blender Internal Materials which utilize Nodes, correct?

If this is the case, it’s unfortunate, because many models (I think character models, especially) use Material Nodes pretty extensively.

Does anybody know of any work-arounds?


Hi David, we don’t support cycles but we do support Blender internal materials, and native blender files. Have you tried our Blender exporter? Here are a few blender resources from our blog: http://blog.sketchfab.com/search/blender

And a recent awesome Blender model by Xelus:

https://sketchfab.com/models/4e7ed6c477564c8eb40749a4e5acdf89

No, you don’t support all Blender Internal Materials. Any Materials that use the nodes are obviously not supported. Yes, I’ve used the Blender Exporter, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything. Is there any way to get Sketchfab to support nodes in Materials?

Hi David, we don’t support nodes in materials, but we plan on supporting cycles in the future.

That sounds great.

I have never been able to get even the Blender Internal Materials to look right in Sketchfab when they have any sort of UV-mapped textures applied (this results in most everything just being matte black). It’s very frustrating, and I’ve just taken to making everything that I upload be essentially monochromatic. So I’ll be watching for the updates.

Also, I think it was great of Sketchfab to donate to the Blender Foundation.

Sketchfab,

When are you going to allow user avatars again?

Any update on allowing Cycles materials?

I had so much difficulty trying to get my Blender Internal materials to display properly in Sketchfab that I simply resorted to stripping all materials and just showing them monochromatically.

Does anybody know of other sites for hosting 3D models?

Seems like there is a bit of a buzz starting around WebGL / HTML5 and engines that support them… I’ve tried quite a few, it depends on what you are looking for… all in all this is awesome news for BA and blender in general… Since Sketchfab works directly in BA they definitely have a leg up. Give it another 6 months… exciting times.

seems like the File > External Data > Automatically Pack into .blend
or
File > External Data > Pack all into .blend

would help with these sites. I’ve had some good success with exporting to collada (.dae) then importing.

here are some alternates.
http://verold.com/http://www.gootechnologies.com/ - hosting (export collada from blender)
http://geta3d.com/ - hosting (native .blend - blender version 2.64a required)
http://blend4web.com/ - generate HTML or JSON to host on your own (native .blend ver 2.70 required)
http://threejs.org/ - generate HTML to host on your own (export collada from blender), they have .blend files as examples but expert user required)
http://p3d.in/ - threejs based, drag and drop .obj and images onto browser window.

You’ll have to try them to see who supports what depending on what you want…

I appreciate it. I looked at geta3D, and although it might work great, it requires a plug-in, and when I’m sending files to others, most people aren’t going to want to download anything (I know I don’t like doing that!) I’ll look into the others, although your descriptions hint that they might be a bit exotic for me.

The main issue with materials at Sketchfab is the lack of support (as far as I can tell) for alpha channels in UV mapped images, and multiple UV maps. Most all of my characters have multiple UV maps and, for instance, with superheroes, I’ll just have a black mask over their face, which is a .PNG over the regular BI material - this is pretty basic stuff. Well, it just shows up as matte black in Sketchfab, even if you try and customize it there.

I believe BlenderNation linked to a new site a month or two back, but I can’t find it.

I’m sure you’re right about the future: I’m not too knowledgeable at all about web development tech, but it seems that it’s becoming more dynamic and flexible at a pretty rapid rate.

I know what you mean… you just have to re-do your UVs and put them all onto one map :wink:

So, Chrome and Firefox have support for HTML5 / Javascript so you wouldn’t need a plug in for them as long as people use them… I think IE 11 just came out with support for webGL etc… IE is way behind on this front.

I found the blendernation post you mentioned… I meant to go back and try it out also… added it to my list in previous post


http://verold.com/ - looks pretty promising also has a blender uploader
A detailed walkthrough video is coming soon. If you run into any problems or have questions, please reach out - [email protected].

at this time your best bet may still be to get http://camstudio.org/ and upload the video to Youtube :wink:

Once someone supports cycles I’ll be all in on that front and then we need support for the Game Engine !!!

Added this one… very simple, drag and drop .obj and images make some simple tweaks.http://p3d.in/

Verold looks great…but I can’t figure out how to import .Blends. Do you have to first export models in another format?

Doesn’t take .blend -> Yes, I recommend .FBX

It takes many formats in… recommends in the video tutorial on the site to zip all of your files together then drag and drop em into browser window.