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 finally begun work on something I’ve been dying to do for years – integrating all our assets natively in Blender through the new(-ish) asset browser!
The idea here 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 don’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 patron Nextcloud access…
The add-on will be included in the $5 patron tier, though we will also sell it on the Blender Market for a flat rate.
Proceeds from these sales will of course be used to create 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 (of assets 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 covers that we (and everyone) could use on a 3d book asset.
We arranged over $1000 worth of prizes and got our patrons to vote on the best designs.
Overall the project was a great 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 just 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 Covid, 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 rejected!) 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 render 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 his popular environment course, and I’ve already seen some of his 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 aaalmost 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 ArtEngine’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.
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