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.