Dev Log #09

Another two months goes by!

Our year has started slowly as we expected. Near the end of last year a lot of our time went into the Smuggler’s Cove campaign, leaving us with little else in the publication schedule for this year so far. But we’re working hard to catch up and start producing assets regularly again 🙂

James has temporarily moved away from Poly Haven full time to work on a TV project for a local studio (he’ll be back later this year), so it’s been more or less just Rico working full time on assets, with Rob giving a bit of his spare time between other projects.

Some of the Cove assets have been uploaded to polyhaven.com already, so if you’re an Early Access Patron you’ll be able to see them after logging in on the site 🙂

Keep an eye on the library for the next week or two to see them all there.

FBX Files

One of the main projects I worked on in December was FBX download support for all our models.

This was going to be done inevitably, but we put a rush on it to accommodate a collaboration with one of Pixar’s RenderMan community challenges.

Texture Dimensions

I also spent some time implementing the backend code necessary to publish the real-world dimensions of all our textures:

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This data has been in the Blend files since the beginning, so it was just a matter of fetching this information and adding it to our database (and setting it up to do this automatically for all future textures too).

The dimensions are also a part of the API response, meaning asset managers can theoretically make use of it to apply the material at the correct scale in your 3D scene automatically.

Speaking of our API…

API Documentation

Our API is mainly an internal tool necessary for the function of polyhaven.com, but it is also public and meant to be used by developers to access and share our assets more easily (e.g. inside 3rd party asset managers).

As I explained in my web architecture overview last month, I’m not exactly familiar with managing a public API, so until recently it was quite poorly documented.

Now however, all the important public endpoints for dealing with assets are fully documented in the OpenAPI 3.0 standard, including available parameters, response schemas and examples:

https://redocly.github.io/redoc/?url=https://api.polyhaven.com/api-docs/swagger.json

HAT Add-on

I also spent some time on an internal quality-control Blender add-on, which is meant to help us maintain a consistent technical standard for all of our assets.

This is not meant to be used by anyone other than us, but it is public anyway and the full list of things it can do/test is here: https://github.com/Poly-Haven/HAT

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As a final teaser for next time you hear from me: We have some exciting news that we’re not quite ready to share yet about additional funding, team expansion and hardware purchases 🙂