Sketchfab embeds 3D files straight in your webpages - see the model above.Ĭongratulations on being the first 'Commercial' Blender add-on! Can you tell me a bit about why you created this add-on? I had a chat with Sketchfab Founder and CEO Alban Denoyel about this project and about the role of Blender in their community. You may not have noticed, but Blender 2.70 comes bundled with a plugin to upload your model to Sketchfab - it is in fact the first add-on to follow the Blender Foundation's rules on commercial add-ons.

I hope you enjoyed your first visit to Virtual Reality with your cardboard! If you created a model specificly for VR, we’d love to see it - go ahead and post it in the comments below (just leave the link to your model in your comment).Sketchfab is the first company to use the offer for including (commercial) external services add-ons in Blender. This will show in VR if you make the effect too strong, so be sure to use subtle normal map effects. It’s a known issue that normal maps aren’t ideal for VR because there’s no actual height data associated with them. Google Cardboard by Virtual Studio on Sketchfab

You can find in-depth information about transparency in our Help Center.

You have split up transparent parts into separate objects.

They are not intersecting with each other.

If you see artefacts in your model, then carefully examine your transparent geometries and ensure that: This is nothing new, but in VR mode it can become extra-pronounced. Transparent parts can cause depth-sorting problems. So if you want your audience to enjoy your work both from a browse and with their cardboard, I recommend you set up two versions just add '' to the title of the VR version.Īll post processing is disabled in Cardboard mode as we found it simply required too much processing power for a smooth playback.

As you cannot move around in a Cardboard scene yet, decide if you want your audience to 'examine' your scene (place the camera outside the scene), or to ‘experience’ it (place the camera inside the scene).įor now, we don’t support setting two cameras in your scene (one for web-based viewing and one for VR).

Set the camera’s Field of View to 120 degrees ( see this article in our Help Center).

This will convince your brain that you’re actually ‘inside’ the scene.

Try to place your camera at ‘eye level’.

The main differences are the field of view (FOV) and the camera’s height. You’ll find that a VR camera behaves a little differently from the default Sketchfab camera, and that it may require several rounds of tweaking to make it feel right. Make sure you have the actual device to test on, too! If you’re designing something for a client, be sure to agree on the specifications of supported hardware. Of course, the latest devices have much better specs than older hardware. Again, the exact number depends on the hardware (and in VR it’s twice as low), so be sure to test!

We fully support animation playback on mobile devices, but mobile WebGL (especially on iOS) has a limitation in the number of bones that you can use.

This will reduce the amount of video memory that we’ll need to use and will increase performance.

Use sensible texture map sizes and pack your textures together in a texture ‘atlas’ if you can.

Keep the geometry complexity low - like in game development, use a low polygon budget and work from there.

To ensure smooth playback on mobile devices, be mindful of the following: This tutorial will give you an overview of the most important limitations and will help you to quickly teleport yourself into your first Cardboard experiment. So it won’t come as a surprise that you need to keep some things in mind when designing a Cardboard scene. In addition to displaying a regular Sketchfab model on the lighter hardware of your phone or tablet, we now render each image twice (once for each eye). You can now literally publish your model to Sketchfab and view it on your Cardboard in under a minute.Īs Cardboard relies on mobile devices, there are some extra things to keep in mind. With our new Cardboard VR button, Sketchfab has become the easiest way to view your designs in Virtual Reality.

In this post originally published on the Sketchfab Blog as ' How to set up a Cardboard VR scene for Sketchfab,' Bart Veldhuizen explains what designers can do to make their models as VR-friendly as possible. At the same time, it's worth bearing in mind that creating a model for VR may take some extra consideration. At ArchDaily, we think this is a huge step in defining how we will view and share architectural design in the future, and one of the best things about the new feature is how seamlessly it blends into Sketchfab's existing model sharing platform. Earlier this month, Sketchfab announced a new feature which would allow any 3D model on their platform to be viewed in virtual reality on a device such as Google Cardboard.

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