CC0 Archviz updates
José Sena writes:
A little about the project
A couple of months ago my friend Guilherme and I created a website called CC0 Archviz, where we release for free 3D models on various formats. We made it because so many people asked us during the last 3 years about the models we use in our architecture office (former archviz studio). We wanted to release them since the beginning but we didn’t have the time. When we got a big project we decided to take a break for few weeks but since we can’t stay away from CGI we decided to use the time to launch our little project.
After a really long time preparing the models and creating a website focused on usability (on desktop only because it’s our main target) we finally put it online. After two months, hundreds of e-mails, some thousands of unique visitors and US$ 32 (split in 2 months) we decided to write an update post for those who are following our work.
Some numbers.
- At the moment I’m writing this post we have released 32 models (26 on our website and 6 as Patreon early access).
- During the last two months we had 3.448 unique visitors.
- We have 6 patrons supporting us with US$ 17 per month.
- 76 Instagram followers.
- 41 Twitter followers.
- Our free time (combined) to clean, unwrap, texture, export, render the preview images, upload and post one of the hundreds of models we have on our hard drives is about 6 hours per week (if we use all our free time to do this).
- And most important of all: tons of feedback messages from people saying they like our work. You guys can’t imagine how happy we are with all the feedback we got over the last couple of months.
The current status and the future of CC0 Archviz
We can’t say running an open source model library is a picnic. There is always something to do and almost no time. Most of the people are really nice but there are some people sending us offensive messages every week. Things get rough sometimes. But truth is: we are really happy.
Of course there is the time vs money issue. We got a great number of messages saying that we should create model packs and sell them on Gumroad, Blender Market and other 3D stores. We don’t have problem with people doing this at all. As we said earlier, there are tons of people making good paid stuff and this is great. The reason we don’t want to do this is because we always wanted to release our stuff for free. I love open source projects and I’m really happy to be running one.
I’m not going to be an hypocrite. Even though we didn’t start this for money we need it to make things as we wanted them to be. At the moment we both make enough money to pay our bills, but we can’t just refuse paid work to work for free. As obvious as it may sound, things costs money. Guilherme just finished college and has it’s bills to pay and I’m going to be a father (I’m so excited!). As you can imagine, releasing models can’t be our priority right now.
We would love to have more time to focus on releasing models but it depends on how much support we can get on Patreon.
Conclusion
For now all we wanted to say is thank you. For those who dropped us a few bucks and for those who can’t do it but like our work, thank you so much for the last two months. It’s a great time for open source and we are really happy for being a part of it.
What are some of the offensive messages (not the actual messages but the areas/categories) and how do you deal with them?
Great work by the way.
All you can imagine: our models sucks, our website is unusable, we are wasting our time, the country we live sucks, etc, etc. Most of them are written in a very offensive way.
Now we usually just ignore them. In the beginning some put us down but now with all the positive feedback we got is getting easier and easier to ignore the offensive ones.
But is important to notice that even people sending very offensive messages may have a point. For example, a while ago we got a message calling us all kinds of names because our Roughness maps were missing the last “s”. It was a typo on the export preset and we didn’t noticed. I sent a “thank you” message and fixed it for the next models.
If you are curious, you can search here on Blender Nation our previous post and see that even here we got some toxic feedback (but the most part of the comments were great, of course)
I’m glad you liked.
Wow! I am not sure I have seen Bart delete a comment before. At least there were plenty of positive supporters in that thread.
I thick its often difficult to empathise with what the provider is trying to do when, as a user you have one goal.
The fact that you spent time and effort to make all this free, in different forms, with search and presentation is lost on someone who is following a link from a forum where someone has causally said your site offers a free model and it will work in that users workflow.
I’ve deleted comments before, but not on this post. Do you think something is missing?
Can’t make everybody happy. But despite some toxic people, having all the positive feedback keep us wanting to do more and more.
And Bart, I think he is talking about the comment you deleted on my previous post.
Ah that might well be. If people have uncomfortable but constructive feedback that’s fine. Toxic crap gets deleted ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cool!
Nice progress)
Meanwhile, we’ve got Diamond since last post.
https://fund.blender.org/
Congratz, man! Hope more people using Blender in their jobs contribute to Blender Development Fund.
By the way, what PL are you programming?
Our website is PHP. We use WordPress. I created a theme using Foundationpress and with some functions and plugins got everything working. It’s not ideal but works.
I used to be an AutoCAD LISP programmer, that was a nice days with lambda-calculations)
That was at the begining of framework and web2.0
By the way.
Are you sure, you can release Eames trademark under cc0?
Don’t forget – cc0 license is only for your model, not design, so, basically, you have to provide license protection to part of model, that don’t belongs to you – actually, it’s design and trademark, that stands after it.
Otherwise, you can easily put yourself in a pretty much difficult position, sharing third party.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll put a disclaimer on our download page and add something about it on the license page. Thank you so much.
You are welcome)
Some regular stocks just declining publishing models even under royalty free license, forcing to use editorial only if model depicts some brand.
There were also war between BMW and stock – as a result every BMW model was deleted from turbosquid.
So be careful.
The site is dead !