For the past year, TurboSquid has been on a valiant quest. Our goal was to find the answer to this important question:
“What is a quality 3D model?”
We searched high and low for the answer. We looked at resources on the Internet. We read and re-read books on 3D modeling. We perused forums, both ours and outside ones, for discussions about topology and UVs. We climbed every mountain and forded every stream. (Okay, not really, but you get the picture.)
Then we asked our customers and artists what they thought, and the result was the TurboSquid 3D Modeling Series.
TurboSquid 3D Modeling Series
The TurboSquid 3D Modeling Series is a set of Best Practices articles and videos in our Knowledge Base. These articles are available to any artist who wants to learn how to create 3D models that will appeal to the widest variety of customers. As a bonus, these Best Practices are not geared only toward TurboSquid but can be applied to custom 3D work too and even to stock 3D to sell on other websites.
The Best Practices section in our Knowledge Base has two topic categories, 3D Modeling and Publishing. Each topic includes videos on how to implement the practice with your 3D models and published products.
You can start with the TurboSquid 3D Modeling Series topic to see an overview, or just go right to the first technical topic, Ngons. At the end of each topic is a link to the next topic in the series as well as to related Knowledge Base articles and videos.
If you want additional help in implementing these practices in your own work, please contact our Support team and they’ll be glad to assist you. We’ll also be holding coffee-break-length webinars on each topic over the next few months at a variety of times to accommodate all time zones and countries. We’ll be announcing these on Facebook and Twitter as well as on our blog. We invite you to attend these free webinars and learn first-hand how to implement these Best Practices.
Straight from our Customers
In researching these Best Practices, we had a great resource at our fingertips: the many artists who purchase stock 3D at TurboSquid. We surveyed over a thousand of our customers (and our TurboSquid member artists, too) on a variety of modeling-related subjects from topology to texturing. Many of the answers confirmed what we’d suspected all along, while others were a little surprising. Below is just one of the dozens of questions we asked.
We also used a number of other tools for getting at the customer mindset, from analyzing buying patterns to interviewing our top customers in person. Here’s a video from one of those interviews.
We’re excited about bringing you this important information straight from our customers and artists, and we hope to see 3D artists using these Best Practices to improve the quality of all stock 3D and custom 3D modeling industry-wide.
What do you think? We’d love to hear your feedback on these Best Practices, whether you’ve used them in the past or are considering adopting them now.