CheckMate sales have passed the 20% mark! At present, about 3.5% of 3D models at TurboSquid are CheckMate certified, but sales of CheckMate models account for over 20% of 3D models sales revenue. Customers have told us over and over that they’d buy CheckMate models every time if they were available in every category. Get your models into CheckMate now, while many categories are still open!
In celebration of hitting the 20% mark, I present this meme featuring the Y U No Guy. I have the same question myself.
NEW ORLEANS, OCTOBER 25, 2012 – What do Weta Digital, Electronic Arts, and CNN have in common? Leading artists from these companies, all members of the CheckMate Advisory Board, convened last week at the TurboSquid headquarters to discuss best practices for constructing 3D models, the digital props and characters used in films, TV production, video games, and architectural visualization. While the filmmaking industry has, over its hundred-plus years of evolution, developed best practices for constructing facades and physical props, the relatively young visual effects industry hasn’t had parallel guidelines for digital props and characters.
“The realism achievable in modern visual effects starts with carefully researched models with realistic textures. Investing the time to collect detailed reference is essential,” said James Ogle, Lead Modeler at Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based visual effects studio known for its groundbreaking work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, Avatar and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. “It’s also important that these 3D models are built using modern techniques and tools for easy compatibility with today’s advanced animation and rendering workflows. The requirements for models have changed a lot over the last few years.”
In response to these changes, TurboSquid, the leading 3D model marketplace, surveyed over a thousand production artists across all industries to find common denominators. The results were released in August 2011 as the CheckMate 3D Modeling Standard, and then TurboSquid formed the CheckMate Advisory Board to continue the standard’s development.
“I just assumed every company had their own way of doing things that didn’t overlap with our methods,” said Jed Denjean, Computer Graphics Supervisor and standards-keeper at Blur Studio, who recently worked on the opening sequence for the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. “Until I joined the CheckMate Advisory Board, I didn’t realize there was so much common ground.”
The meeting’s discussions centered on best practices not only for the construction and texturing of 3D models, but for ensuring accurate reproduction of real objects such as cars, stadiums, electronics, and even people. The Board also discussed how 3D models could be constructed to retain their integrity when opened by different 3D modeling and image finishing software packages.
“It’s not unusual for us to run a bunch of 3D models through three or four software packages just to produce one scene,” said Fred Ruff, Computer Graphics Supervisor at Portland-based Bent Image Lab, whose credits include commercials for Bing and Coca-Cola as well as special effects for NBC’s hit TV show Grimm. “We get 3D models from so many different sources—contractors, in-house artists, and marketplaces like TurboSquid. The industry needs a standard like CheckMate so we’ll know that all the 3D models from all these different places work in our production pipeline.”
As part of their commitment to the CheckMate standard, TurboSquid has made training materials and quality-checking tools available to the public on their site, and will also publish the results from the most recent CheckMate Advisory Board meeting.
“Getting some of the best minds in the field together to distill best practices was unprecedented, and more productive than any of us had imagined,” said Matt Wisdom, CEO of TurboSquid. “The wealth of information we gathered will lead to a big step forward for all industries that use 3D models.”
“Meeting with such great artists made this meeting a real treat,” said Carlos Cristerna, Director of Visualization at Neoscape, an award-winning architectural visualization firm that relies on 3D models to showcase their clients’ not-yet-built structures. “We are excited about the CheckMate 3D modeling standards effort. Nothing like CheckMate has ever been done before. We had a lot to talk about.”
About TurboSquid
With a catalog of over 250,000 unique 3D models,TurboSquid is the world’s source for quality stock 3D. TurboSquid’s community of over 2.5 million artists and customers come from every line of production, including movies, games, news, advertising, architecture, engineering, simulation, and defense. TurboSquid introduced the CheckMate standard to improve quality across all production pipelines and make the lives of artists easier around the world.
The CheckMate Advisory Board met last week at TurboSquid headquarters in New Orleans, and what a meeting it was! Over the two-day conference, Board members discussed a variety of topics ranging from UVs and gamma correction to outsourcing and education.
Advisory Board members meet at the TurboSquid headquarters. Clockwise from lower left: Jerome Denjean (Blur Studio), Fred Ruff (Bent Image Lab), Rob Wright (CNN), James Ogle (Weta Digital), Beau Perschall (TurboSquid), Viken Majoulian (Electronic Arts), Carlos Cristerna (Neoscape).
Some of the key takeaways from the meeting:
Accuracy and Reference Materials
Because 3D models are used for match moving and compositing so often that high accuracy of real-world objects is extremely important. When a customer positions the model over a still from the live action footage or photo, they should match perfectly.
For stock 3D, Advisory Board members asked that artists put in the product description the method they used to build the item accurately. If the artist has photos he can use as thumbnails, he should put up a photo of the item used as reference (clearly marked as a photo so customers don’t think it’s a rendering) and then a second thumbnail showing the model overlaid on the photo. If the artist can’t include these images, he should explain which types of reference that were used and where they came from.
What this means for TurboSquid artists: When you publish a model of a real-world object, especially vehicles and street elements (which are frequently used in match-moving), include the information described above. Remember that you cannot include exterior websites in your product description, but you can describe them. Example: “Reference used: Photos from XYZ Airlines website gallery.”
What this means for CheckMate: We’re considering having this requirement as part of a “CheckMate Plus” standard in the future. Start doing this now, and you’ll be ready!
Levels of Detail
For any type of model, the ideal is to have three models available with different levels of detail.
Background model. Intended for display in less than 1% of total screen space. Low poly with great textures. Example: A car at the back of a large parking lot. Basic mirrors and hood ornaments modeled, but grill and door handles represented by textures. No interior necessary.
Midground model. Intended for display in less than 10% of screen space. Convex details modeled, concave details textured. Example: A car in a parking lot, parked closer to the camera than a background model. This is not just a subdivided version of the Background model. For example, the grill and door handle would be modeled, but tire treads and headlights would be represented by textures. Low-poly interior for items above seat level.
Foreground (Hero) model. Enough detail to look good when displayed in 100% of screen space or extreme close-ups. Example: A car right in front of the camera. Tire treads and headlights would be fully modeled, and even the stitching on interior seats.
Since the Hero model almost always needs to be customized, and they know about the need for the model well ahead of time based on storyboards, production artists will usually build it themselves. They might use a purchased Midground model as the basis for a custom-built Hero model. All other models of real-world objects, both Background and Midground, can usually be purchased from a stock 3D site.
A special case for a stock Hero model is when an Art Director decides at the last minute that he wants to change the storyboard and zoom into a Background or Midground model instead. If there’s no Hero model handy, the production facility might buy one from a stock 3D site to avoid having to wait for an in-house artist to build it. This situation isn’t as common as purchase of Midground and Background models, but if the customer needs a Hero model and a high-quality model of this type is available in stock 3D, they’ll pay top dollar for it. But until there’s a detailed Hero model for every conceivable item in the world with all possible variations, production artists will continue to use stock 3D mostly for Background and Midground.
“Even if we aren’t sure we’ll need them, we’d probably buy both of them just in case,” said one Advisory Board member.
This doesn’t mean they’ll never purchase a Hero model. If they find one that works for them, they’ll buy it. But this situation is less common than finding Midground and Background models that suit their needs.
What this means for TurboSquid artists: Having both a Midground and Background version of a model available at TurboSquid as separate products, with product IDs for each listed on the other’s description, will help customers purchase model pairs that will take them all the way through a project. If you have a Hero version too, refer to that one in the Midground and Background product descriptions as well.
What this means for CheckMate:We’re not sure yet. Advisory Board members said they’d like to be able to purchase packaged sets of 2 or 3 models with different levels of detail (LODs), but CheckMate currently allows only one model per product. We’d like to see some artists putting up separate products as described above, and let’s see how they sell. We do plan to allow collections in CheckMate soon, so that might be a solution for bundling sets of two or three models with different LODs.
The Future of CheckMate
These points just scratch the surface of what the CheckMate Advisory Board talked about. We’ll post a more comprehensive list of takeaways, plus some video interviews with Board members, in the coming weeks.
Many of the discussion points will lead to future changes to the CheckMate standard. You can get a jump on quality now by utilizing this information when you publish your new 3D models at TurboSquid.
The CheckMate Advisory Board will convene in New Orleans Oct 11-12. This group of individuals, each of which is dedicated to setting and enforcing 3D modeling standards within his own organization, will inform and shape development of the CheckMate standard to ensure it meets artists’ needs going forward. Meeting topics will include:
Use of standards in production pipelines
Standards for UVs and textures
Naming conventions for objects and files
Training on standards
Future standards
The meeting promises to be exciting and informative. We’ll be back with a full report afterward!
Check out our latest artist tutorial especially useful for those working through the steps to submit models for CheckMate Pro certification. The specification states (in item 2.1.1) that there can be no Isolated Vertices found in models submitted for certification. We hope this video will serve as a useful guide for 3D artists to find and fix Isolated Vertices using xView in 3ds Max 2010 or later prior, moving them closer to submitting their models for consideration.
Find “xView” in the drop-down menu and once your mouse is over it another set of options will appear and you want to select “Isolated Vertices”.
Go to “Customize”, then “Units Setup…”, and select “Generic Units” so that it matches our CheckMate script.
Select the model.
Go to the bottom and select “[Click Here To Update]”. All Isolated Vertices will appear in green.
Select the object with Isolated Vertices that you would like to fix, then again select “[Click Here To Update]” at the bottom.
Go to the modify tab, and under “Selection” choose “Vertex”.
To fix the Isolated Vertices you want to go to the bottom and right-click where it says “[Isolated Vertices: # Vertices]” and choose “Select Results”.
Once again, 3D model customers have made their preferences clear. While only 3.2% of the 3D models at TurboSquid are CheckMate Certified, these models account for over 18% of sales.
TurboSquid strives to give customers what they want, and that is more CheckMate models! Here are some comments from recent CheckMate Pro customers.
“The model being CheckMate Pro helps me know that I don’t have to do any tweaking before rendering, which is very good to know when on a tight deadline.”
- Johan S.
“I always look out for models with the CheckMate sign. These models have always met my needs and expectations.”
