Model Guidelines

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We provide you with a guideline to meet our model requirements. Feel free to share with your 3D artist of trust!

General 3D model requirements

  • To achieve a high degree of realism, the models must be made very precisely - imperfections and slight scratches are welcome!
  • Opacity maps can be used for cut-outs (e.g. leaves), but not for creating structure/details (e.g. fabrics, perforations)
  • Do not use displacement maps or bake them into geometry if necessary
  • Mesh has to be optimized, but smooth, with smooth curves to avoid faceted geometry
  • All models need to have real thickness, with closed geometry (no holes, double vertices)
  • Try to stay between 10k and 100k polys if possible (or even less for really simple objects)

Sub-Objects

Assign different materials to different parts of the object and name them accordingly. E.g. a shampoo bottle could have three sub-objects that are named “Body”, “Cap”, and “Label”, and should have a material each that is called the same way: “Body”, “Cap”, and “Label”. One sub-object should only use exactly one material. If one part/element is made of 2+ different materials, it should be divided into 2+ objects.

Special Cases

Double-Sided Materials & Volumes

Our software treats every surface as double-sided. If you have e.g. a label that should be visible from both sides, and the backside looks flipped, create a label with a small thickness and apply two different materials to it. Concave objects should have a real volume (no missing faces).

Transparent Parts & Intersections

  • Ensure that models that are under a transparent surface are modeled
  • For surfaces where two transparent materials touch (e.g. glass or plastic with liquid inside), please make sure that there is a tiny spacing between them. This prevents artifacts during rendering. Please model all liquids and glasses where they are in real life.
  • Opacity maps and values should not be used to create transparent materials
  • Glass always should have a real thickness

Manual UV-Unwrapping

Customers must receive the models with the correct UV allocation for the entire model.

  • The entire model must be unwrapped (not implicitly projected, as this information will get lost in the process). Everywhere.
  • The object shouldn’t have UV overlays (UV coordinates are unique)
  • Do not use UDIMs
  • UVs should be packed efficiently and have reasonable seams
  • Especially, in areas where labels will or could be applied, the UVs need to be uniform and should not be stretched
  • Explicit parts of the model that represent a label should use the entire UV space as sub-objects with their own placeholder material
 

It is not necessary to put everything into a single texture/UV layout, and the method of dividing your model by splitting between elements/materials is up to you.

💡Tip: you can assign different materials to different parts of the object and name them accordingly with descriptive names. E.g. a shampoo bottle could be divided into three sub-objects that are named: “Body”, “Cap”, and “Label”, with materials named respectively: “Body”, “Cap”, and “Label”. If a material is used by one element, it improves the user’s experience and allows the use of all the features in the studio (e.g. color exchange).

Materials & Maps

Materials

Materials are one of the most important components for photorealistic assets and images. Have an eye on details, and use imperfections/scratches. You can find a good standard of quality here. See also examples at the end of this document.

  • Use highly detailed materials that look real from very close
  • Use the PBR Metalness-Roughness Workflow as defined in the GLTF/GLB standard
  • Do not use opacity maps as a replacement for geometry
  • Allow the labels to be easily exchangeable, so no distortion within the maps
  • Do not bake lighting

Maps

  • Provide at least 4K resolution textures (lower res only for very small parts of the object)
  • Always provide at least the following maps:
    • diffuse (color)
    • normal
    • roughness
  • Exceptions can be made for super homogeneous surfaces, but these cases are usually really rare
  • You can create normal maps with a software called Materialize if you do not have the original normal map of a material
  • We currently support these maps:
    • Base Color
    • Metallic
    • Roughness
    • Normal
    • Ambient Occlusion
    • Emission (coming soon)
    • For transmission use the Khronos Extension
    • For subsurface materials please get in touch with us - well show you how to do it
  • If one surface contains two materials (e.g. paper with a golden print on it), bake these properties into the maps but provide the masks that you used.

Labels

  • If a label file is provided (e.g. as .ai or .png), please do not cut the label into multiple patches or textures. It should be possible to exchange the label by a new one with the same aspect ratio by just one click for us.

Lighting

  • Do not override any lighting information in the final file.

File structure

  • The 3D model needs to be at XYZ = (0,0,0) and has its pivot in its center of mass
  • Sub-Objects also should have their pivot in the center of mass
  • The 3D model scale has to match the real-world scale in size (1 unit = cm)
  • Use descriptive American English names, e.g. “label” or “cap” for each sub-object and their respective placeholder materials

Output

Please export the model as a .glb file with no compression.

 
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