Poly Haven/AmbientCG integration with Blender Asset Browser

[gregzaal]

Hey all I’ve been wracking my brain about this idea for 5 years and I think it’s better to open a discussion about this than try to figure it out alone.

The broad idea is this:

I want to have direct integration of Poly Haven and other online CC0 asset libraries inside of Blender’s asset browser. All our assets (HDRIs, materials, models) would appear in the asset browser as if you had them installed locally, and when you drag and drop them into your scene it downloads them automatically and places them in your scene.

Why

Ultimately it comes down to “it just should exist”, and it’s something that I as an artist actually want to have.

Having direct access to our assets inside of your 3D software is more convenient than having to go visit our website and download it yourself.

There’s clearly a demand for this kind of tool, because other developers have already taken our assets, packaged them in exactly this kind of add-on and made a ton of profit for themselves. I won’t go down the rabbit hole of how much I dislike that whole idea, but I’ll just say that I think it has to be us (the people who make the assets) who create the add-on, or at least work directly with the people who do.

Background

There are a few reasons why I haven’t worked on an add-on for this already.

The main question for me is how this would affect Poly Haven as a business. We’re not a traditionally for-profit company, our goal is simply to create free assets for everyone. But we employ a few artists and hire a few freelancers to create these assets, so money is ultimately what makes the assets keep coming.

Poly Haven is one big experiment to see if it’s possible to make free content sustainably. I know I come across as a money-minded business guy these days, but just know that my goal is to figure out how we can push the boundaries of open source and make it something that can support artists sustainably.

We have two main income streams: Donations (Patreon and corporate sponsorships), and advertising on the website.

Donations only happen when we have an opportunity to ask for them - i.e. on our website where people currently have to go to download assets. If people no longer need to visit our website, they may not think of us as much every time they use our assets, resulting in fewer donations long term. We would need to find a way to remind people that we need their support inside of Blender, but doing this in a way that’s not as annoying as those wikipedia banners will be a challenge.

Advertising income is directly linked to page views on the website. If people aren’t visiting the website as much anymore, that means less income, and we have to start cutting back costs and making less assets.

How to move forward?

If we ignore or assume we’ll find a solution to those issues above and want to go ahead with some kind of “Poly Haven add-on” anyway, the question becomes: How specifically to do that?

We could make a completely free add-on for everyone to use, or we could lock it behind a Patreon paywall so you have to support our work in order to have the most convenient option to use them (they’ll always be free on the site). Or some kind of hybrid: a temporarily patron-exclusive add-on that becomes free for everyone once we reach some funding goal. This goal would have to be fairly significant, and what happens if we never reach it?

Or, we could simply integrate with BlenderKit, where the assets would be free to use, and we would still earn something from their profit share system. This is the easiest solution in terms of my time investment, but it leaves us with little control over the actual integration in Blender (e.g. we’d like to have some more features like automatic texture scaling so you don’t have to eyeball how big those bricks are supposed to be), nor any security long term. We already have all our HDRIs on BlenderKit, but the income from this is more “supplemental” than “sustainable”. We could add our materials and models too, and market BlenderKit on our own site as the official intended Blender integration for our assets.

Then what about AmbientCG and other CC0 asset libraries? Ideally they should be integrated too, but would they all agree with our implementation and how it affects their income?

What about non-Blender applications? Is something like Quixel Bridge more appropriate or should we stick to focusing support on the community that’s closest to our core values?

…

Maybe now you understand why I haven’t actually worked on this add-on in the last 5 years Analysis paralysis.

I hope you guys have some ideas and feedback so we can come up with a practical solution together <3

[scopelma (Matteo Scopel)]

Of course, this would be awesome, but I can also see how difficult it could be to implement “right”. I don’t know if you’re aware of this plan, but I think Blender foundation is planning to introduce an API for other vendors to provide addons/assets: https://code.blender.org/2021/10/blender-3-x-roadmap/
As it usually is, this could happen this year, in the same way it could happen in a few years or never. Still, I think it could be relevant for you, as potentially it could allow you to have a much better way to integrate your assets in Blender, and perhaps without writing a separate add-on. I hope this can be useful. Perhaps you could even influence with your feedback or needs how this feature could be implemented? Given how used and important Polyhaven is, I think you’d really have a chance of influencing this! Particularly for the payment/donation request part.

I hope this can be useful!

[gregzaal]

I’m aware of the idea and I’ve spoken to some of the devs a while ago. As far as I’m aware, it’s a very long way off and I’m skeptical if it’ll ever exist.

IMO there are certain things that should be handled by the Blender Foundation officially, and certain things like community projects that are better handled by the community itself.

An add-on manager (for installing from the web and handling automatic updates) is another idea I’m working on that has been notoriously requested, but would probably never be handled officially, and would IMO work better as a community-managed project outside of the Blender release cycle.

[fr002 (Francis Jasmin)]

Hi,

First thank you for the work you are doing with PolyHaven. Free, Open and High Quality textures and HDRIs are awesome, really.

I would personnaly go for a paid addon on Blender Market and others online store (i.e flippednormals)

I understand that you are producing FOS content, but selling something is the best and most efficient way to make money.

Donation has it limit.

Blender is an Amazing project, but, even has number of download has surpass 28 millions, individual donation has mostly stall for the last year+ (I look at the DevFund numbers almost every week).

And it works because Blender is immensely polular. More “small” project as Krita, Godot have, unfortunately, gotten a lot less in donation.

So I come back to my argument that selling an addon is the best way to achieve good money and invest it back to hire more artist.

Even Blender sell Blender Studio subscription and apparel.
…

The link to the addon you have provided have made a Huge amount of money.

8600 sales * 90$

774 000

Wow.

I look a lot at Blender sales and Sanctus material library or Materialize have also plenty of sales and are on the same category as yours. There is a huge revenue potential on Blender Market.

Still,

I think providing a free version of some sort is necessary as not everyone has the same financial ressources, but one does not prevent the other.

[Elk]

Thanks for all the greate work you guys are doing at Poly Haven. Been hoping for some sort of add-on like this for a while. So here is my two cents about a couple of the “issues”;

I think a separate add-on would be the best. Nothing against BlenderKit, but i prefer Poly Haven and AmbientCG kind of libraries where quality is more “consistent”/“predictable” among all the assets. On a side note to that if there is an “official” colaboration with AmbientCG and maybe other libraries, an option to add/view all or just one or a couple of library at a time would be a must in my opinion, not just group all in one big library.

When it comes to the buissenes side of things, maybe it would be an ide to have the add-on be free, but then you have to go “shopping” on the web site so you can get the add revenue. My thinking here is if there is a link to the website, then you could search and look for what you need there right on the website, and add whatever you need to a sort of temporary shopping cart where you can then copy that shopping cart list and then paste into the add-on again so you can download more at once. And then there could be an option to unlock browsing right inside blender if you support on patreon or you buy the add-on through blender market or gumroad for instance. I know this would be a no brainer for me if this was a paid add-on on BM.

I could probably go on and on, but this was just some quick rough ideas, feel free ta ask if something is not understandable or you want me to elaborte on any of it.

Very much looking forward to see how this turns out good luck with the project.

[koob3d (paul booker)]

Having just made my first asset blend file for your great textures, I would have appreciated a method of obtaining such a file from your site. So rather than an add-on, I go to your site, drag my chosen materials into an area which builds them into node trees, marked as assets, into a blend file called say “Materials” which I could then download and place in my Assets folder. It maintains traffic to your site, but saves everyone a lot of duplicated effort in the shader editor.

[Michael_W]

something like QUIXEL BRIDGE could be an interesting model. Im sure you’ve seen it but: it runs as a separate application and provides easy browsing of materials and scans /models etc but has a blender addon that makes it trivial to send assets to blender. (unfortunately it doesn’t work very well as it hooks up the node trees for materials tl wrong slots so needs manually fiddling with.

i suggest this because from blender you could have an addon that launches a browser to your website (or an addon specific page on your site) so you still get traffic that way and can banner/ad revenue how you like. but then you send assets directly to blender.

one step further would be to create an editor type in blender that is actually a web browser (though perhaps of a streamlined nature) that could have asset site links as favourites pre installed to your site and others… then have a send to blender button on your web pages.

this could all be awesome or really terrible. depends on immplementation but the "slick"version could be amazing!

[init_pixel (missing_field)]

@gregzaal

I won’t go down the rabbit hole of how much I dislike that whole idea,

I’ll happily say it’s an absolutely reprehensible practice and is one of the reasons I’ve almost completely lost interest in distributing on a platform where it’s allowed to happen.

[gregzaal]

Thanks for the replies guys

I understand that you are producing FOS content, but selling something is the best and most efficient way to make money.

I would agree with this - I used to sell my HDRIs before switching to the Patreon model like 5 years ago, and I always knew that in terms of maximizing profit, this was not a wise business move. It took about 2 years of running the Patreon thing to get back to what I earned from selling them. But money is not everything, and I don’t regret that decision one bit. I’m scared to go too far down the paywall road, but I’m not entirely against the idea of simply selling the add-on either (especially if we keep it on GitHub publicly too like Retopoflow and Gaffer).

The link to the addon you have provided have made a Huge amount of money.

8600 sales * 90$

774 000

Wow.

From my own experience selling on the BM, the majority of purchases happen in their seasonal sales (25% discount).

Also, this dev has another add-on based around HDRIs instead of materials.

So more realistic math (only accounting sales from the BM, not their own site where they also sell it) would be: (8600 * $89 + 2700 * $59) * {25% discount} * {30% BM fee} * {5% payment processing & exchange rates} = $460k, or $13k per month over the last 3 years.

For some context, Poly Haven gets about $10k per month total and supports a team of 4 full time staff plus 5 regular contractors.

I think a separate add-on would be the best. Nothing against BlenderKit, but i prefer Poly Haven and AmbientCG kind of libraries where quality is more “consistent”/“predictable” among all the assets.

You’re right that quality over quanity is key here. BlenderKit’s filtering options are pretty decent but not the way I would personally like to set them up.

There’s no reason we can’t do both though.

I go to your site, drag my chosen materials into an area which builds them into node trees
…
something like QUIXEL BRIDGE could be an interesting model

I’ve always wanted to do a custom protocol handler that lets you click the download button on the website and it automagically appears inside Blender. It’s a bit different from my idea of having all the assets already inside of Blender just waiting to be assigned, but it’s something I have to figure out for the add-on manager idea anyway so it might be fairly easy to implement down the road.

I’ll happily say it’s an absolutely reprehensible practice and is one of the reasons I’ve almost completely lost interest in distributing on a platform where it’s allowed to happen.

There’s nothing legally wrong with it, and it clearly makes the BM a lot of money so they won’t be interested in doing anything for morality’s sake. Andrew_D did contact me years ago to ask in a roundabout way if I was OK with him doing this. My position was the same as it is now: I don’t like it, but if the tool adds a lot more value than just the assets themselves (i.e. the add-on is the product, not the assets), then it’s good.

In this particular case, the add-on does seem useful, but the pricing is very high for a Blender add-on, meaning a large part of the value proposition is in fact the included assets (which is also reflected by the marketing on the product page).

To be fully transparent, Andrew_D does support us on Patreon. I can’t share details of how much for how long, but in the lifetime of his support it’s been less than 0.5% of his total earnings.

In any case, let’s maybe try keep the discussion focused on what we should do next

[sozap]

I think it’s more convenient to browse assets on the website rather than in blender, where information is limited and preview quite small.
Unless you build a custom UI which is quite some work.

Maybe having an account on the website that allow to “bookmark” some assets, and then from blender you can quickly download them and append to the project would be great ?

What would be awesome is to use the same addon with different websites, but it may be a bit harder to manage that with the first idea.

Good luck with that project, and thanks a lot to bring quality assets to everyone !

[fr002 (Francis Jasmin)]

@gregzaal

I would agree with this - I used to sell my HDRIs before switching to the Patreon model like 5 years ago, and I always knew that in terms of maximizing profit, this was not a wise business move.

I’m happy that someone from the FOSS community see market potential of selling services or content.
I know I have already make my point, but I think to much project in the FOSS community are a bit shy of selling content (i.e asset) & services (i.e addon).

The problem arise when a product doesn’t reach multi billion/million of users. Wikipedia or Blender can rely on donation. But for smaller project it seem less doable and there doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the number of user and the number of donation.

Maybe because increasing the number of users who can not afford to donate doesn’t increase one revenue. I don’t know. I’ve just making assumption here.

Not very related, but I still think Blender could have his own ‘‘Blender Market’’, same as Unity or Unreal. They are letting quite a lot of money on the table, in my opinion.

Although they have stated they do not want (not their mission) to manage and create such a store, which I can agree.

@gregzaal

So more realistic math (only accounting sales from the BM, not their own site where they also sell it) would be: (8600 * $89 + 2700 * $59) * {25% discount} * {30% BM fee} * {5% payment processing & exchange rates} = $460k, or $13k per month over the last 3 years.

For some context, Poly Haven gets about $10k per month total and supports a team of 4 full time staff plus 5 regular contractors.

The fact that you could more than double your revenue is pretty amazing !

@gregzaal

The broad idea is this:

I want to have direct integration of Poly Haven and other online CC0 asset libraries inside of Blender’s asset browser. All our assets (HDRIs, materials, models) would appear in the asset browser as if you had them installed locally, and when you drag and drop them into your scene it downloads them automatically and places them in your scene.

Yes !

I like that fact that you want to use/stay inside the Asset Browser. To much addon in my opinion have their own browser inside their addon. This clutter the addon tab and make it difficult to have all material and asset you possess inside the same place.

I had proposed to Sanctus to offer an Asset Browser version of his addon. Which he did.

It could be a bit like Quixel Bridge in Unreal Engine. It show you all the assets/textures and you can download the quality you want inside the engine (1k, 2k, 4k…).

You could also already use all the preview sphere you have on PolyHaven, since Blender 3.2 support WebP format and those can be use inside the Asset Browser preview.

@gregzaal

Then what about AmbientCG and other CC0 asset libraries? Ideally they should be integrated too, but would they all agree with our implementation and how it affects their income?

Yes !

Having more then one CC0 texture library would be awesome !
I suppose that revenue could be share proportionally between the percentage of downloaded asset or percentage of total asset one have.

On the technical side, is it possible to use the Asset Browser as Quixel Bridge and only show preview and download requested quality on demand ?

[thetony20]

@sozap

Maybe having an account on the website that allow to “bookmark” some assets, and then from blender you can quickly download them and append to the project would be great ?

To me that sounds like a good solution. One could still use the website without any login and do it all ‘manually’.

However, if you create an account and login, then its still the same full website, info, etc, etc but you can ‘mark’ the assets for download/import into Blender.

Then, using a free Blender addon, you add your Poly Haven login (and/or other CC0 sites) to pull down and add/update any marked assets to the local Blender Asset Browser. You’d even have a button on the addon that basically opens a web browser of the chosen library and uses the login details saved in the addon preferences to auto login/welcome you back, display what has been added/updated since last visit, etc.

Needs a bit of prototyping, etc but in general it sounds like a solution to all of the issues.