Some VFX Love for Sketchfab

General Discussion
#1

Hi there fellow VFX artists out there!

Not sure if you know Sketchfab.com, a webGL based 3D model viewer that kept growing over the past years.
It’s really cool to present your 3D work there, the PBR quality rivals game engines. But it still doesn’t compare to proper engines if it comes to vfx.
Still waiting for the day they add a simple shader editor or HLSL support as well as some way to do particle fx.

While animators and modelers can use it to present their work on Sketchfab I still feel we vfx artists are having a hard time sharing a portion of our work in realtime in a browser. I feel like Sketchfab could become a tool for our community to share some interactive work if the devs pay some attention to vfx artist needs :slight_smile:

Luckily I have some good contact with the devs and if they see there is some interest in such a feature they might add some particle system and shader editing features. I’m already promoting the idea a bit but the more users are interested, the higher the probability that it will be added.

If there are some artists here who already use Sketchfab or are supporting this idea I encourage you to head over to the Sketchfab forum to start a topic and share their opinion on particle system / shader editor support for Sketchfab.
At the moment the community seems to be lacking vfx artists and I feel we could make a fine addition, as well as see some Sketchfab embeds with vfx here on realtimevfx.com.

It also helps to outline our idea of the feature in terms of complexity and feature set to present it to the devs, if enough people are interested in the addition.
Tell me what you think :slight_smile:

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#2

I think this is a neat idea, but falls short on one major concept - vfx have to be made directly in the engine. So in this instance, Sketchfab would have two choices - create their own vfx engine, and force us to create all of our art work in it, or go through some seriously painful porting process to allow us to create within all of the obscure choices of engines we use (or just Unity/Unreal), and convincingly replicate the intricacies of said engine.

Other disciplines have much more standardized pipelines/tool flows, so all that sketchfab has to do is replicate portions of it in a satisfactory way that allows the art to shine through, and we as viewers can look past the shortcomings of sketchfab directly. Unfortunately, that’s not really an option with VFX - as the art I’m capable of is entirely dependent on the capabilities of the engine i’m using.

I’ve also been really excited to see more efforts/successes with Unity and Unreal projects rendering directly in WebGl/Brwoser - although then we have general browser issues (Last time i checked, Unreal doesn’t work in Chrome?)

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