Has the 3D Warehouse died or is it just me?
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The question is, how long will it take for a SCF certified model to wind up in the 3DWH with some snot nosed prick taking full credit for it?
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@patrickbateman said:
I think giving a lot of requirements would be prohibitive. I think by nature that it would be from the sketchucation community would weed out most of the crap and encourage people to share. I don't think a ratio system or restrictions should be in place. Maybe have a one-time mandatory upload before you can download anything and get access? So every user would have to upload a quality model and have it get approved before gaining access to download anything.
The point is to stop the leeching. It's essentially time sharing. A professionals time spent on giving something away is time not spent earning money. If it is reciprocal then it's not just time spent to provide the lazy with a means take and profit from anothers generosity. I mean let's face it, there is a whole arm of the 3D industry that does nothing more than build boxes and fill it full of stuff they've leeched or pirated. To them 3D visualization is like playing with a doll house and rearranging furniture. In the end, the clients have no idea, but the integrity of the industry suffers greatly.
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@unknownuser said:
The point is to stop the leeching. It's essentially time sharing. A professionals time spent on giving something away is time not spent earning money. If it is reciprocal then it's not just time spent to provide the lazy with a means take and profit from anothers generosity. I mean let's face it, there is a whole arm of the 3D industry that does nothing more than build boxes and fill it full of stuff they've leeched or pirated. To them 3D visualization is like playing with a doll house and rearranging furniture. In the end, the clients have no idea, but the integrity of the industry suffers greatly
Well said, and I totally agree.
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I think we can pay each modeler to build a lot of the models and then give them away for free...
you ask how could such craziness work?
if you go and search as an architect might while deciding what door to use in your next model. you might search Pella's website, Jen-Weld, Andersen... yada yada... every construction product manufacturer on the planet pays someone to model every product they produce, if they don't they're planning on it. if you search the websites I mentioned you'll find their models don't represent the product well or are not available in sketchup format. for instance on interior door, one style has some 88 variations of itself. 6' 7' and 8' heights, 1' through 6' width variations... not to mention sub styles. and this is just one door from one company in one style. I have tested myself building a set of these doors and can finish the 88 in about an hour. once you have the style done, editing it to different sizes is fairly quick. now if you charged a company $10 for each door; that would be $880 for the set. now different products are going to have different modeling times.
this would pay the individual modeler and give a profit region for SCF and even perhaps allow us to lean on the various product company servers for our downloads. they will of course be hosting the models on their own servers, so we could hard link to the files in our database and allow search here without hosting.
with the professionals here devising a set of model standards and the power of the SCF community to point future users to this collection and thus their products... I think it could be a great way to accomplish a few goals simultaneously.
- allowing work hungry modelers to get paid
- building a repository of clean, professional models
- expanding the SCF community
- cleaning up product website models and making architectural modeling easier on everyone.
- expanding the foot print of sketchup in the professional world.
of course this idea would need a sales staff of sorts approaching companies and offering the service and then someone assigning the work list and people arguing about who gets what work...
I don't know... what do you think?
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@krisidious said:
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of course this idea would need a sales staff of sorts approaching companies and offering the service and then someone assigning the work list and people arguing about who gets what work...
You may be interested in this topic and its accompanying web site from three years ago.
You are right (although I think your idea in quotes is a bit wonky) but be prepared for some irrational rants about advertising and webdialogs as I got in similar topics around that time.
But good luck - it might just happen if people can accept necessary commercial reality.
I am trying from a different perspective based on very similar ideas.
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Much as I hate to rain on your parade guys, this has been tried before...and failed.
The original PushPullBar had exactly such a system, called the Component Depot. To discourage leechers you had to earn brownie points in order to be able to download anything. These points were earned by making meaningful contributions to the other forums...architectural discussions, tutorials etc.
They eventually abandoned it because they got so much hassle from newbies simply registering in order to help themselves, then constantly bitching when they found they couldn't.FormFonts already runs another sharing section...which does not require the purchase of a subscription. It's called the Exchange; and that's what it is. You upload models of your own and earn download points to enable you to access the models of others. It differs from the Warehouse in that all submissions are vetted...as they have to be if you are going to have any kind of quality control over the content. To be honest, it's pretty much ground to a halt...not because of lack of submissions; quite the reverse; I shudder at the size of the current approvals queue.
The reason is that it is sadly impossible to overstate the laziness and venality of the average SketchUp user. Despite a EULA (which you have to agree to) stating quite explicitly that all content must be your own work and of a pro quality, well over 90% of it isn't...and that requires a helluva lot of weeding out. We get all the usual pirated content from Dosch, Lowpolygon3D etc that you get on the Warezhouse. We even get our own content posted back to us. Some of the posters are even too F+++ing lazy to get rid of the primary, obvious tiers of branding...like the default FormFonts layer that the model is on.
Most of the rest of the stuff that isn't pirated is simply imported manufacturers' CAD models, like B&B Italia. I say 'simply imported' because that's exactly what it is...it isn't cleaned up; it isn't polyreduced; it isn't de-triangulated...or even smoothed in some cases. A sizeable percentage aren't even the correct scale. It's quite common to have a sofa half a mile long. Many models are submitted unpurged...with hundreds of materials and dozens of other models included. I could go on and on. but in simple terms you get buried under an avalanche of all the stuff you avoid on the Warehouse....in fact most of it will be from the Warehouse.
Needless to say, it takes quite a while to check over any new submission for all such possible defects...even before you start checking on its provenance to avoid legal action from commercial suppliers. Good Luck guys.You may have some success with a select collection by and for serious professionals...all the usual suspects that keep these boards alive, but TBH you could probably do much the same with a Google+ group. As for approaching manufacturers, you'll have a little catching up to do.
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Great points Alan and nice to hear some advice from someone established in this area.
I think the merit in this discussion is that there's a willingness to make something a bit different than normal. I'd even go so far as to say a Freemason's 3D Society so as to prevent the situation of 3DWH and FF (to a small degree).
Maybe Freemason is a bit OTT more a SCF Premium Members Marketplace called Builderberg
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Count me out. I'm not modelling wearing a pinny and with my trouser leg rolled up. I'm quite happy the way I am...stark naked.
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@ Alan Fraser
As for approaching manufacturers, you'll have a little catching up to do.
As this is my special interest I would like to add something about it. First of all I would not approach manufacturers but specifiers ... for them to say "if you want me to consider your product you will have to submit models and data like this" - i.e. the manufacturer is responsible for the quality of any model and data supplied. In return manufacturers get the opportunity to present products at the right time and in the right place. If some models escape well any publicity is better than none. I think, Alan, what Formfonts provides is very good for making models whereas what I (and I think Kris) want is to use models in order to create the real thing. A little different I think you will agree.
@modelhead
you will put me out of work...
I have always liked reading your posts, particularly as you seem to like to add a little dottiness. But I wonder if here you have added too much when the whole thrust is to expand modelwork at the expense of paperwork type processes.
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Just note that our Woodworking forum does maintain a SCF Woodworking collection on the 3D Warehouse.
The 3D Warehouse has several nice features that could allow it to be used as a private, commercial repository.
- Collections of models and Collections of Collections.
- Shared models, shared collections
- Share as viewers or as collaborators
- Collaborators
- Model history
There would be some amount of labor involved in curating the collection and administering who can access the collection, but it is manageable (especially if the work is divided between several team members.)
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@unknownuser said:
more a SCF Premium Members Marketplace called Builderberg
You guys know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but I would think there has to be some REAL measurable meaningful differences from Free Google. . .SketchUP for Everyone and those of us who forked down the $500 plus the upgrades. This to me seems to the area. Wouldn't the 3DWH be light years better improved it were partitioned into the flea market for free users and a SketchUP BLoomingdale's for those who are licensed paid users? Even if there was a subscription fee, secret handshake and a password? Just some thoughts.BTW. . .nobody gave me a
or a 
for my Raiders of the Lost Ark reference. Hurts my feelings guys. -
I disagree with "Pro" users having specific access. I don't think that free SU users all turn out substandard work and it excludes a large user base if it is pro-only access, and dare I say that one of the reasons SU is so popular (and these forums) is because it's free. The "real" difference should not be based on the size of your wallet.
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I'd vote against a lot of restrictions and such. I think the only restriction should be some method of making sure that whatever is warehoused would be quality content. Whether that means someone actually approving each model or simply only letting registered sketchucation users UPLOAD models.
I think when you put limitations like ratios, it promotes more models of lesser quality. For example, if I run into a limit and want to download a bench, I'm not going to spend an hour modeling a nice piece of furniture. I'm more liable to pull out a second rate model and throw it up there in order to download my bench.
And as was mentioned restricting downloads in other ways can just create a hassle. I ended up never really going to pushpullbar because I could never figure out what I was supposed to do. I got registered and made some posts but I would find someone sharing models which I couldn't download and other things. It just becomes annoying and I didn't have the time or inclination to try and figure out the rules.
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
I'd vote against a lot of restrictions and such. I think the only restriction should be some method of making sure that whatever is warehoused would be quality content. Whether that means someone actually approving each model or simply only letting registered sketchucation users UPLOAD models.
I think when you put limitations like ratios, it promotes more models of lesser quality. For example, if I run into a limit and want to download a bench, I'm not going to spend an hour modeling a nice piece of furniture. I'm more liable to pull out a second rate model and throw it up there in order to download my bench.
And as was mentioned restricting downloads in other ways can just create a hassle. I ended up never really going to pushpullbar because I could never figure out what I was supposed to do. I got registered and made some posts but I would find someone sharing models which I couldn't download and other things. It just becomes annoying and I didn't have the time or inclination to try and figure out the rules.
-Brodie
exactly. I think by nature it being sketchucation would make quality high and people would rate them. We could have moderator review models and have low quality ones removed. As soon as you put ratios, download limits, subcription fees, whatever it will never grow enough to be useful.
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@unknownuser said:
@unknownuser said:
... the whole thrust is to expand modelwork at the expense of paperwork type processes.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean chris
Just that this type of thing is about passing around labelled models (think cans of soup in supermarkets) rather than documents like ortho drawings and voluminous specs that need interpretation to be usable. In this case, if it catches on, modelers like you will be much in demand.
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