Blendflare - New Free Platform for Blender Resources (Feedback Welcome)

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hey Blender community, we’re building Blendflare, a free platform to centralize and organize Blender resources.

Inspired by BlendSwap, BlenderKit, and Blender’s demo scenes page, we wanted to create a place where the community can share everything: 3D models, materials, HDRIs, node groups, brushes, decals, complete scenes, animation rigs, educational resources, and more.

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We come from a more technical background and found it really difficult to find specific resources for technical demos, testing, and benchmarks. We needed scenes that met certain requirements and there wasn’t an easy way to search for them. So we built this with proper categorization and search filters, hopefully it makes it easier for both artists and developers to actually find what they need.

Upload and download are completely free. You can upload .blend files or zips (up to 600MB) with flexible licensing, Creative Commons (CC0, etc), custom licenses, or retain full rights. Everything is organized into specialized categories with filters to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

It’s in early development and pretty empty right now. We need the community to help fill it with content and give us feedback on what’s missing or broken.

Check it out: https://blendflare.com

Questions or suggestions: https://discord.gg/322PAAYuVg

Thanks in advance for any help or feedback!

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Since the assets are free how do you plan on sustaining your initiative?
Server space and bandwidth aint cheap.

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Great question! We definitely have this in mind. For now, we have a few ideas: we’re considering offering sponsorship tiers or accepting donations, and there’s also the possibility of implementing non-intrusive ads similar to Blender Artists’ AdNet. But right now, our main focus is on making sure the platform is actually useful for artists and the community. Thanks for bringing this up!

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Personally I wouldn’t be against selling premium curated asset packs, but without proper strategy that might overtime diminish the quality of free assets.

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That’s an interesting idea, our initial vision was actually to build a comprehensive Blender repository that goes beyond just assets, including workflows, methodologies, educational resources, and technical demos. We want it to be a knowledge hub for the entire community, not just an asset library.

That said, we’ll definitely keep the curated packs idea in mind as we grow. We’re committed to keeping the platform community focused and making sure any monetization approach we eventually take doesn’t compromise the quality or accessibility of free resources.

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Also:

I really do not want to be negative here… but you might know: this sometimes is a bad world… :wink:

Who are “we” ? There is no About or Who we are… page… also in the TOS and Privacy pages the “contact” is only blendflare.com for email and website…

If one does look up the registered owner then this is:

  • Name: On behalf of blendflare.com owner
  • Organization: Identity Protection Service

…so… how can one “trust” you ??

Also talking about:

Browse thousands of high-quality .blend files.

Well… it’s okay to reach for the stars… but maybe a bit… :thinking: much yet ??

Again:
I do not want to be negative but if “the users” upload what they want (without copyright infringement) then the quality thing is very hard to hold on (?)… one can see this even on some “serious” and “well known” 3D assets sites…

There was already some other attempts and there is (are) some where the people behind this tell who they are ( and they make a bit of money because people can pay for “premium” assets which after some time also become “free”; one making all the assets for an open sourced game from the commmunity… so they have some “quality control” ).

You might think about this and good luck and happy holidays…

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You’re absolutely right, and thank you for the thorough feedback! We just launched the initial version and are still working on key pages like About, Contact, and polishing the site content. These are definitely priorities for us right now.

Regarding trust and transparency: we’ll be adding a proper About page with information about who we are. The domain privacy is just standard practice during early development, but we completely understand the concern and will address it.

On quality control: we do have a reporting system in place, but it definitely needs to be improved. We’re actively working on better moderation tools and community guidelines. As for the “thousands of files” text, that was actually a placeholder from development that we forgot to update before launch. Good catch! We’ll fix it to reflect our actual current state.

We really appreciate constructive feedback like this, thanks.

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