We launched our CheckMate certification program back in 2011, and in that time we’ve hand inspected and certified over 40,000 products on TurboSquid. The spec has gone through a couple of updates over the years, but one thing that hasn’t changed much is the list of formats that we certify – 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D, and Lightwave. We’re happy to announce that we’ll soon be adding a new format to the mix: Blender.
Blender is an application that’s been around for many years, and we have tens of thousands of products on the site that include a .blend file. But we’ve been impressed to see the recent growth in the amount of customers who identify as Blender users. There’s a demand for high quality, professional, certified Blender content, and we’re going to deliver that to our users.
If you’re new to CheckMate, the idea is simple. We have two certification levels – CheckMate Pro and CheckMate Lite. Checkmate Lite models are all opened and inspected by the CheckMate Inspection team and are guaranteed to work like a customer would expect after seeing the preview images. CheckMate Pro models undergo a more rigorous technical inspection and are held to high standards for topology and material creation. These models are built with industry best practices in mind and are adaptable to almost any pipeline.
We are currently in beta, working on the inspection process with a few artists, and we will be accepting Blender CheckMate submissions from all artists very soon. We’re excited to become an even bigger part of the growing Blender community with CheckMate support, and also with Blender support in StemCell later this year.