Dev Log #11

 

The last two months have been busy! But I have a feeling this is only just the beginning, it's gonna be an exciting 2nd half of the year!

Blender Asset Browser

I've finallly begun work on something I've been dying to do for year - integrating all our assets natively in Blender through the new(-ish) asset browser!

The idea her is to save you time and speed up the creative process. rather than having to go to our website and find what you need, it'll be available directly within Blender itself.

This will be done by an add-on that downloads the smallest version of each asset to keep on your hard drive permanently (currently around 3.3 GB for our 969 assets, though this will grow slowly over time as we publish more assets).

Then once you drag and drop the asset into your scene, you'll have the option of selecting a high resolution version of the asset from a dropdown menu.

One core requirement for me is for the add-on to handle texture scaling (so that you do't have to eyeball how big the bricks are supposed to be every time) and material setup like displacement settings.

Now we're committed to providing all of our assets for free on polyhaven.com, but this add-on will be an experiment in selling more convenient access to our assets, much like the 5 dollar patron Nextcloud access...

The add-on will included in the 5 dollar patron tier, though we will also selll it on the Blender Market for a flat rate.

Proceeds from these sales will of course be used to crate more assets, and will (like all our other income) be detailed in our finance reports.

A version of the add-on will also be available on GitHub, but may not include auto-updates (ofassets or the add-on itself).

Community Contest

Remember the book cover design contest we ran in 2020 ?

The project was a community contest where we asked people to design original CC0-compatible book convers that we ( and everyone) could use on a 3d book asset.

We arranged over 1000 Dollar worth of prizes and got our patrons to vote on the best designs.

Overall the project was a grat success, and now we'd like to do it again! Only instead of book cover designs, we'll do actual 3D props!

We'll have more info for you soon, I think it's going to be a lot of fun :)

Translations

Poly Haven is now available in more than justt English!

We're looking for help translating the site into a few of the most-spoken languages. If you'd like to help, check this page :)

Blender Conference

For the first time since Covide, there will be an actual Blender Conference in Amsterdam this year !

Rico and I have been before back in 2017, but this year promises to be a much larger event.

I'll be there again this year, and (assuming my proposal is not rejeected!) also do a talk about Poly Haven and how we make it work.

I look forward to seeing some of you there !

Render Gallery

Finally we have the ronder gallery back up and running !

It's  really motivating to see what people are creating with the help of our assets - if you've got something so share, we'd love to see it !

Creating 3d Environments Course

Rob recently released an update to this popular environment course, and I've already seen some of this students work popping up in my twitter feed :) check it out if you're interested in making nature environments like this! 

Texture Workflow Article

We're almost ready to share the texture-equivalent of my How to make an HDRI article.

In fact we're completely done with it! But the timing of Art Engine's demise has forced us to wait until we're certain we can recommend using it. The last thing we want is to tell people to flush money down the drain.