Is it illegal to sell models that have been made via retopology process using free cad models as a bassis that have been downloaded from sites such as GrabCad? Keep in mind that I’m talking about models that are a copy of a real world item and are in no way an intellectual property of the uploader.
Sounds like a facsimile to me and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some legal precedent against such practices. Imagine someone retopologises and tries to pass off purely as their own something from the gallery, or one of your models. Shonky for sure. Were you to model from measurements and end up with a virtually identical mesh, fair enough, that’s the price of accuracy.
just retopo?
i too would consider such work as reproduction… thus licensing mostly dependant on the original/source
That’s kind of an interesting question. Is it always legal to copy a real world object?.. I think it’s often a bit of an uncertain area in architectural or interior visualization. Sometimes the philosophy can be: if you get away with it - its fine. It doesn’t seem like a very mature and lawful kind of an attitude, but it’s sometimes so confusing. Just because an object exists in reality does not mean a model representing it is not intellectual property of the person who made it. Think of photography - in most cases everything in a photograph is real and is not created by the photographer, but the copyright protects it as photographer’s creation. I am most interested in furniture myself. Furniture’s functions mostly cannot be patented or copyrighted, however some district unique designs or visual aspects sometimes can be. What if I take a photo of those designs? Does the copyright of the photo belong to me alone? Am I using someone else’s intellectual property? What if I make a visualization with that exact design copied even referencing the creator and manufacturer of that design like it happens all the time with interior visualization? Who will be hurt because of it or unhappy about it or suffer any kind of loss or damage because of it? Is it the same as with a photograph, or should we treat it different?.. I think there are sometimes no applicable well defined laws in this area. It’s often unclear if the designs are or should be protected by copyright laws, but it’s often also unclear even for the creator if they should be unhappy about someone copying their designs in some ways. I think it’s a good idea to communicate with the creators of the objects or virtual assets and think of all the reasons someone might get upset about you selling the stuff modified or just ask them if they mind if you are worried about it. I copy designs of furniture manufacturers and designers every day openly to them as well, they have no reasons to be upset even though technically I am sure there are cases when they could find a law against it, but they are interested in letting us continue making visualizations because that helps them sell stuff. Look at this: https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-model/minotti. Minotti does not care about this. They have no reason to complain or sue anybody for this and nobody else will. So you can get away with it and it’s fine and it’s not even ethically wrong in this case in my opinion.
Yeah, I think you guys are making a compelling argument. Now that I have read everything I think it would be very unethical and/or illegal of anyone to use CAD models as a blueprint or as a retopology base. It’s best to stick to collecting images online and building the model yourself. Besides, a lot of professional argue that copying from a copy is a bad thing since you never know which proportion has the original author missed or made with wrong proportions.