what you guys think about this?
Blendswap should be consolidated to the blender cloud somehow.
Blendswap is an incredibly useful resource for beginners, imagine how much more useful it would be if it was something similar to the current blender cloud texture addon.
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Yes, it’s a shame losing it. It’s an useful resource, even for simple sharing. But it looks like its business model doesn’t raise enough…
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The concept of blendswap is a great idea for easing content creation and not just for beginners. Professional artists make extensive use of online assets and once the library gets to a point where you can find anything you want at a professional quality, then scene creation, animation and storytelling will all be more accessible to everyone and less reserved to those who can afford to get a team to work on a project.
Now, when it comes to the execution of that concept, the website itself and the staff support have always had some big flaws in my experience, which are still unresolved.
On the website itself:
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while there is a comment sytem and what we could consider a basic forum for questions, there is no notification system (at least for the comments), so there is no way to know if any of your comments have gotten a reply or even if any of the blend files you’ve uploaded have had a comment on them unless you directly go and check on the page. A common problematic consequence of that is asking “could you fix that on your model or include a texture you forgot?” and never getting a reply from the author or even if you do get one, never noticing it.
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the search engine doesn’t include titles and doesn’t inform anyone about it. This is easily the biggest flaw in the website. The search engine is the most important feature for a website that provides assets for artists who are looking for the right model to include in their scene. If you don’t warn the person who uploads a model that it won’t be findable by typing its name in the search bar unless it’s copied in the tags field, then many, many people will miss the model they’re looking for. To give you some edifying examples, if you type “witch” you’ll get a few witch models but you’ll miss this amazingly sculpted witch, yet the model is litterally just named “witch” but the author didn’t include that word in the tags. Pretty ridiculous. Now type “hippo”. You’ll get almost nothing, yet you’re missing on the awesome production-ready CGCookie hippo model. This is the official freakin’ CGCookie account being unaware of the situation, just to give you an idea of how absent the communication is on this. There may be hundreds of blend files being missed by artists just because of that. Coupled with the absence of notification system, you end up with me trying to warn authors that they didn’t include the title in their tags and never getting a reply or seeing it fixed.
On the staff side:
- I’ve had a long mail discussion with the staff to try to get them to put a warning on the upload page that titles aren’t included in the search engine, explaining why it’s problematic and all I got as a response was that this is not that big of a problem, so they won’t add what is literally a line of text to this page.
- A few times I’ve had a model been rejected for no clearly explained reason and it took forever to discuss with the staff to resolve it. In fact I still currently have a rejected model for a reason I don’t know and haven’t had a reply to the multiple mails I’ve sent in months. The only thing I know is that my model is believed by the staff to be “impersonating other 3D artist”, even though I sculpted it entirely from scratch myself.
Now, supposing blendswap disappears, there are quite many great alternatives: free3D, sketchfab, turbosquid and the list goes on. A blender specific website is not necessary as long as the website provides a blend file filter in its search engine. Plus the Blender Cloud is planning on adding an asset sharing platform. So unless the blendswap staff decides to be more responsive and listening to recommendations and plans to seriously work on improving the website, not just continue maintaining it, I’m affraid I won’t be supporting it.
I like the idea that most of it use some free licenses
so I think this should still be retained
but there could be a new section for higher res models where you would have to pay a minimum amount but not like on Turbosquid where models are very nice but very high res and cost a lot .
Blendswap should not compete with Turbosquid or sites alike
happy bl