Latest UI of the 3XR Blender Add-On Available for Download
Check Scene feature in use. This is used to validate every model submitted. On button press, a validation report pops up with any warnings or errors the model may have. (I.e. model is too big, too many triangles, not atlas textures, etc.)
Web collection renaming tool in use. Used to solve for artists having to remember specific & long naming conventions for each model.
UV checker tool in use. Used to solve for quickly visualizing UV layout & incredibly helpful to find areas on a model that have stretched/warped UVs.
Export Web UV Layout tool in use. Used to quickly export a model's UV layout for quicker texturing in Photoshop or other editing software.
High to Low Poly Workflow DEMO
Problem: 3XR required a lot of models to be ingested to their online hosting platform. Artists were complaining that the baking processes to create low poly models from high poly models took too long. The process of giving feedback back to an artist on a model was becoming more like technical checks instead of artistic QA checks, and was adding 5-10 minutes of repetitive feedback per model (i.e. model not named correctly, too many triangles, etc.), which was turning unscalable really quickly. A lot of models were being submitted with warped & distorted UVs.
Solution: To optimize the baking workflow, I created buttons that automatically set up a texture bake for each of the necessary maps to be in line with 3XR standards that would start on button press. This would run asynchronously and the user could see the bake's progress in the bottom toolbar. I added a button to automatically name the objects in the Blender scene to be in line with 3XR standards based off of the name of the Blender file. I created a responsive UI and various validation checks that help an artist understand if their model does not meet the 3XR guidelines in real-time on model submission. If their model does not meet the basic 3XR guidelines, the add-on prevents submission. I created a UV checker tool that creates a new material assigned with a patterned grid that is applied on the model for the artist to view how their UVs are laid out on the model.
Outcome: The Add-On is a required download to be able to submit models to the 3XR platform and has helped to submit hundreds of real-time models for e-commerce from hundreds of different artists. The baking workflow was optimized from being a process that took 20+ minutes to one that now takes a few seconds. It is much faster for an artist to know if there is something wrong with their model- instead of waiting 1-2 days for a 3XR employee to send them a round of feedback manually, they are able to get that feedback immediately on model submission. With the implementation of this add-on, our QA team went from seeing a majority of models fail their first round of review due to non-compliance with 3XR standard conventions, to seeing models be approved within 1-2 rounds of feedback.
In November 2021, 3XR released their codebase under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. I am credited as a main contributor and the codebase can be found here: https://github.com/MikeFesta/3xr
