I hope you've had a wonderful new year and ideally a short break over December like we did :)
This year is going to be a fun one, with many new projects kicking off and some existing ones wrapping up :)
In this Dev Log, we have a few topics to cover:
Community project progress!
The Great Trek: A cross-country HDRI road trip
What Vaults are next?
Add-on Update Update
Video courses (???!)
Project Lighthouse Community Challenge
In case you missed it, at the end of last year we kicked off our latest and biggest-ever community project!
We've already had a huge turnout of talented artists creating props, which will be both released freely on polyhaven.com and become part of our game, Project Lighthouse.
Over $5000 worth of prizes are available for accepted assets, and we've got even more coming early next month!
Read more about the project here. Submissions close in May, so there's still plenty of time to join us on our mission to create CC0 assets for everyone.
The Great Trek
After doing a little team getaway for Playtopia in December, we decided to take a road trip back from Cape Town to shoot some HDRIs in parts of South Africa that we haven't really been yet.
This route happens to coincide roughly with the route that Dutch settlers took in 1836 to distance themselves from British colonial rule, which became known as Die Groot Trek, so I thought it fitting to title our little trip the same.
The first stop on our route was just outside Sutherland, a tiny town home to the Southern Hemisphere's largest Astronomical optical telescope. In other words, the middle of absolutely nowhere and the perfect place for astrophotography.
We took a few amazing night HDRIs that I can't wait to stitch and upload :)
Our accomodation here was a glass house on a hilltop 80km out of town on a dirt road accessible only by 4x4. Even Namaqualand didn't feel this remote.
After that, we took the long way home via some small towns, shooting 31 total HDRIs during the trip.
Vault Plans
In the last Dev Log, I mentioned our progress on the Marble vault. Unfortunately we have not been able to find a supplier to work with. Communications with the few local suppliers we've been talking to have fallen apart, so we've had to put the project on hold for now while we focus on other vault options.
In a few days, the Studio HDRI Vault will likely be released (yay!) when the 3100 patron goal is met. This is awesome :) but it also means we need to scramble a bit to replace it with a new one, now that the Marble Vault is not viable in the short term.
We've opted for something fairly easy, but also in high demand based on our search statistics: A Beach Vault.
For HDRIs, "beach" is one of the most common search terms for which we don't already have a fair amount of content. It's not the most searched, that would be "night" and "city" (for which we also have some tentative plans!), but it's still highly requested and fairly accessible for us.
Dario and Jenelle will be organizing some trips South to the coast next month to shoot some more Beach HDRIs, do a few texture scans, maybe a palm tree or two, and build our next Vault of assets.
Overall, our Patreon support is steadily growing (thanks guys!) and we're on track to Liberate our Blender Add-on within the next 2-3 years.
Add-on Update
In the last Dev Log I also mentioned my work on the next version of our Blender add-on.
This is still in the works, but has taken a bit of back seat while I work on the submissions platform for the Project Lighthouse Community Project. It was a little ambitious to try and finish it before the Blender 5.0 release, so I decided not to rush anything and set it aside for the moment.
I did however go ahead with the price increase on Superhive, which has worked spectacularly well in reducing the number of sales on Superhive and sending a few more people here to Patreon instead.
If you came here after deciding not to buy the add-on on Superhive, welcome! And thanks for your support <3
Do you want training courses?
This is something that's been on my mind for a while now, and something we've discussed as a team several times over the years. I'd like to hear from you guys how you feel about the idea, and if it's something you think we should do.
We’ve always been talking about doing some kind of educational content, be it video courses, documentation, workshops, or just YouTube videos.
No matter how we approach it, it's a huge amount of work. One of the major barriers has always been justifying our time spent on this sort of thing, and whether or not it pays off down the road. We don’t want to use our patrons’ money to cover our time spent making proprietary content, unless we’re certain that that content will fund us much more than it costs to produce.
Sure, it’d be easy possible to sell a training course and, done well, it could make a lot of money, but then we hit our other main barrier: The open nature of Poly Haven and our belief that assets and knowledge should be shared freely to give everyone equal opportunity. To prevent people with privilege and money from being the only ones who can build off of our work.
I believe these are the two main reasons why we haven’t been eager to create training material already.
But what if we made training courses as Vaults?
Just like how the Vaults are a way for us to temporarily “sell” 3D assets while also making them eventually free and growing the Patreon at the same time, we could do the same thing with training content.
We could make a couple of comprehensive video courses about topics we're very experienced with (e.g. photogrammetry, HDRIs, and environment art), something that you'd normally see sell for $70+.
Only, we don’t sell it as a standalone product, we include it as a Patreon benefit at a new $7 tier and release it as a Vault. I.e. we set a goal, and after some number of patrons are reached, we release the course freely on YouTube, but until then it's Patreon-exclusive.
Maybe we could do more than just publish a course, maybe we could do one-on-one mentorships, weekly Q&As, and other educational initiatives.
This has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, so let me know what you think :)
Is this a good idea for Poly Haven? What kind of courses would you like to see from us? Let me know in the comments below.