New Orleans, Louisiana, February 27, 2017 — TurboSquid, the world’s largest 3D marketplace, announced today a beta release of a major breakthrough in standardizing the creation and usage of 3D models. Together with industry-leading advisors, they’ve developed tools and processes that will allow a 3D model created in one 3D modeling application to “just work” smoothly in others. The project is called StemCell.
The 3D modeling industry is full of content creation tools, and it has long been a vexing problem to get content that is created in one tool to smoothly transfer to another. TurboSquid is promising to finally fix that with StemCell. StemCell allows 3D artists to upload a model created in one format to TuboSquid’s servers, where perfect conversions are automatically generated to several other formats. This includes conversions to and from different modeling packages, renderers, and game engines.
“Ultimately, our goal is to make buying and using a 3D model as painless as using a stock photo,” explained Matt Wisdom, TurboSquid CEO. “The demand for accessible 3D content is growing – we saw major companies like Microsoft and Adobe release new tools this past year aimed at making 3D easier for everyone to use. We are in a unique position to speed that process up by standardizing a huge library of 3D models.”
The 3D tool space has evolved over the years, featuring major players like Autodesk and Maxon, but also newer game engine technology solutions from companies like Epic Games, Unity, and even Amazon with their Lumberyard engine. Frank DeLise, Senior Director of Immersive Experiences Group for Autodesk, had this to say: “We’ve been huge StemCell supporters since TurboSquid first approached us with the idea. Sane 3D standardization that will open up a huge library of PBR-based models to our Max, Maya and Stingray developers? We can’t wait! StemCell models will help Autodesk’s community realize the vision for their next game or VR project that much quicker.”
TurboSquid says they were able to approach this problem a bit differently, since their focus is purely on the content. “We’re app agnostic. We want to have models available for customers regardless of the tool they’re using,” said Wisdom. “The key for us is making sure that the customer experience is smooth. By delivering automated, flawless conversions, customers will feel like they’re getting a model that was modeled directly in the app that they are comfortable using.”
TurboSquid realized early on that current PBR (physically-based rendering) workflows could help them build the formula for StemCell. Their StemCell process focused on applying modern PBR texturing workflow principles to older legacy procedural workflows. “I really like that TurboSquid is tackling this problem,” said Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. “Their PBR-based approach to material conversions lines up very nicely with the modern texture workflows that we support and that we’ve seen adopted by tens of thousands of Adobe Substance 3D Designer users worldwide.”
A beta group of TurboSquid artists have begun submitting models built in Max or Maya (with V-Ray) to outputs in Max, Maya, Unreal and Unity. Support for Cinema4D, Blender, Stingray, Lumberyard, Arnold, Mental Ray, and more are coming in 2017.