Is it nearly April already?!

Web Rabbit Hole

Apart from some tax and bureaucratic nonsense, I’ve spent most of this month testing and researching further into various front and back-end options for the new site.

Things are looking a little tight if we’re still going to have a soft launch at the end of April, but since I’ve basically built this kind of site 5 times before in the past I’m fairly confident I can have a working beta by then at least.

I mentioned the 80TB bandwidth challenge last month, and our solution for that seems to be working wonderfully so far.

But apart from just bandwidth, there’s also the challenge of building a stable system that can handle hundreds of millions of requests, many of which need to go to a database to get lists and information about our assets. This is actually the biggest issue with our current sites and a major cause of stability problems recently.

I also want a system that can be used outside of our own site, by third party asset management tools like Asset Ninja and Blender Kit, or potentially our own software in future.

So the first step has been to build a public API and set up a new scalable database, which is now mostly complete. This API provides a way for software to fetch our assets, filtered in various ways, along with a bunch of information about each one.

It’s a lot like what we already have with our /json pages, but a lot nicer 🙂

My solution for the website front end is not completely decided yet, but so far the plan is to build a React app to move as much of the workload previously handled by our servers over to the client (and the API) for a more reliable and responsive user experience.

Then the only thing left is to create a solution for static content like images and thumbnails, the stuff that rarely changes but is added to every time we publish a new asset. Right now I’m looking at Bunny CDN which seems affordable for this use case and also removes some of the burden of server management from my shoulders.

If anyone has some advice about any of this web stuff, feel free to get in touch with me on our Discord 🙂

Latest Texture Scans

We’ve shifted gears a bit towards working on 3D assets in preparation for the site launch, but Meat’s still been shooting a lot of new content that we’ll start processing in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Rob’s still working on his own stuff as well. These two textures were published this month:

Upcoming HDRIs

Here’s a sneak peek of next month’s HDRIs from Sergej and Andreas 🙂

Upcoming Models

More amazing work from Rico and James. I’m really looking forward to sharing these files on the new site!

That’s it for this month 🙂 See you next time!