First off, we crossed a huge milestone this summer - over 5 million verified users now look to 3D Warehouse for their product models! That’s some serious traffic in the Warehouse!
As our user base expands - on a daily basis! - we want to be sure we’re providing the best experience for both users and product manufacturers. In the end, we’re all working together, am I right?!
To make things smoother on the front end, we’ve put a lot of work in on the back end so that manufacturers can now showcase all their products in their own version of a digital showroom, helping users to explore, download and spec the right products, directly into their design.
Some of our compelling features include:
New Catalogs: Designated space for manufacturers to talk about their brand, showcase their product lines and upload all their 3D models - like a digital version of a print catalog (remember those?)
Brand Page: Lists all brands with a catalog by logo for easy access - easy to search, filter, and quick to find!
Brand Optimized Search Results: We’ve been working to highlight our building product manufacturers and we have the analytics to prove it.
Don’t just take our word for it, read more about the updates in our blog post and visit the Warehouse to see the changes in action!
Can I make a plea that you strongly advise, or even require, manufacturers to upload only low to medium poly models, and/or enforce a file size upper limit?
So many 3D Warehouse models are unusably bloated for use as entourage, or for any other use in Sketchup that I can think of.
Absolutely agree. Many manufacturers simply convert their .dwg or perhaps .stl into SketchUp files and put them on the Warehouse. These are fine as accurate models of the products, but way too detailed for entourage, which is what I think most people fetching such models from the EW need. For example, I once encountered a model of a sink that had something like 10,000 edges in the drain strainer!
Agreed, many manufacturers are doing their models with other 3d software and are uploading crazy poly count. I spend so much time cleaning out some of those models to work well in sketchup.
Most manufacturers like to have detailed models with high res textures to put their products on the spot. The new catalog features can be of help in this by providing nice looking thumbnails in thefeatured sections of their catalog. ( a more intelligent way to cope with high poly objects would be to ignore them when out of sight or have a relation between the camera location and the distance, like in many game engines and Trimble Connect’s own 3D viewer. Zooming in would increase the level of detail automatically.
It is not uncommon to have three versions in a 3D repository (High-medium-low)
The bots that the 3D Warehouse are using could do this automatically ( @TheGuz : You can use Skimp )
Above all, the info that is attached to these Products (check the possibility to add custom attributes and links to the manufacturers website) should be availible inside SketchUp or LayOut, too!
and clickable, for that matter
)