Read time: 4.1 minutes
As food is to a restaurant, 3D models are to WebAR business. If you get your focus off the 3D modelling, you can loose your business. On the contrary, a balanced way to produce and supply 3D models for your clients can bring you more appreciation and business. It's apparent which way you'd like to choose – isn't it?
In today's newsletter, I'll break down the ways you can prioritize 3D modelling for your clients. So many people asked similar questions to me over the time. So I realized it's important to cover this topic here.
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Before we begin today, I want to ask an unusual question.
How are you enjoying my weekly newsletter? Does each episode brings some fresh prespective to you regarding WebAR?
I'd really appreciate if you can provide a short testimonial by hitting the Reply button to this mail.
Let's continue…
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Can I just scan with mobile and make 3D for WebAR?
This question will be charted on top of the list for sure. The recent explosion of NeRFs and other AI based models often create such an impression to people. I must agree that often their qualities are quite good too (for example luma.ai).
But while you scan objects using LIDAR or simiar technologies (NeRFs) using your smartphone camera, 100% of the time, the produced 3D models are egenrated with unnecessary artifacts. They are not super clean. You still need to hire 3D professionals to clean them up for best quality.
Your customers can take ecommerce product photos with an iphone and upload to the website. But they still prefer it to be done by a professional photographer. It's the same.
Best ways to procure high quality professional 3D models
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Make 3D: Hire a profesional 3D artist or two to cater all the orders from your customers. In house 3D artists ensure you can deliver quality custom 3D models for better experience.
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Buy 3D: If you have a one person business and not enough resource to hire 3D artists, buy 3D models from reputed marketplace (like Sketchfab or Turbosquid). You can choose high quality and often do small customization by requesting the seller.
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Partnership: Fishing big as a business owner? Got a sudden need of supplying hundreds of 3D models within a short period of time? Make partnership with 3D suppliers who can cater in bulk (like Marvin XR).
Best tool to create perfect 3D model apt for WebAR
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Blender: No doubt about it. Blender is like the new Adobe but open source tool, in the world of 3D. If you need to hire 3D artists, it's always better to hire them who have experience in Blender.
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Why Blender: If the high quality 3D model becomes too big in size, it can crash your users browser. A total devastation. Carefully building 3D experience with high quality while keeping low size is an art. Blender has the capacity. There's a compression policy reduce the 3D model siz quickly.
9 best practices for converting and optimizing 3D models
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Reduce materials and surfacing:
Use PBR (physically based rendering) system. PBR controls colors, roughness and bumpiness. Asset without PBR can reduce its size. It leaves out extra textures.
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Reduce textures:
Decrease roughness map to increase performance. Reduces resolution and amount of textures. Reduces memory consumption and file size. Reduce textures based on visual impact.
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Remove hidden and unused data:
Remove any data that’s not required for 3D models – extra nodes, meshes, materials, and textures. Removing any hidden parts lowers chance of triangle count & simplifies hierarchy.
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Reduce triangles:
High triangle or vertex counts can hinder performance. You can make triangle reduction choices by focusing on reduction on less important areas with high mesh density.
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Reduce draw calls:
Draw calls refers to the number of graphical instructions per frame. Reducing materials on object helps reduce draw calls. Most common runtime performance bottlenecks for 3D often attributed to large number of draw calls.
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Reduce hierarchy complexity:
Grouping, parenting, and large numbers of nodes such as nulls, locators, raw curves, meshes, and joints can contribute to poor runtime performance to simplify your hierarchy.
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Increase distance between geometry faces:
Flickering can occur when geometry faces are coplanar. Especially when the model is animated or moving. Increase distance between geometry faces by a small amount resolves the flickering issues.
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Flip inverted face normal:
Inverted face normal can cause 3D to be shaded incorrectly. Flip the normal of the incorrectly shaded faces.
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Conflicting tangent basis:
Conflicting tangent basis causes normal maps to appear inverted. Export your model with tangents if you are baking tangent space normal maps in a left-handed setup. Alternatively, invert the green channel (Y axis).
That's all for this week. Let me know if you enjoy this episode.
I'll come back next week with another helpful content to boost your AR business.