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The presentation of your files is important and rushing it is a very bad idea. Even if your item is the best ever in the history of the making, if your presentation is lacking, chances are that no potential buyer will ever even take a closer look. Bad presentation hurts your sales as well as the reputation of the marketplace which in turn impacts on everyones sales. It may result in your item being rejected in some cases. Be objective and compare your presentation with other items on the site. Potential buyers will not know how much work went into your model or how well it is constructed if your presentation does not communicate it at first glance. Now this all may sound harsh but it really is well meant advice that will benefit everyone if taken to heart, so lets get started on some good presentation! :)

1. Thumbnails

   Thumbnails, although the smallest, are possibly the most important part of your presentation and may determine the fate of your item. When a buyer scans through the site it is a matter of a split second in which the essence of your item must be communicated. Having said that there are a number of guidelines that can help you make your thumbnail stand out and look professional. Rules of thumb so to say :).

   • You do not need to show the whole item on the thumbnail. Most of the time the thumbnail will be too small for it and when you scale your item down to fit into an 80×80 pixel square, you will most likely not be able to recognize anything. Pick an attractive detail that communicates what your item is and showcase it.
   • Don’t use strong background colors because they take the focus off what you want to show. They make your thumbnail look like a clumsy and unprofessional attempt to grab attention, not to mention that it just looks ugly.  Go with subtle tones and hues that complement your item instead of competing with it.
   • If you are using Photoshop, sharpen images after scaling. I know this is a bad practice when it comes to print media, but when it comes to images displayed on a screen you will suddenly see details that you did not know were there.
   • Put effort into your renderings. A professional looking rendering of your item, be it a texture, model or material, will drastically increase a buyers confidence in the quality of your files and reflect your level of expertise.
   • Be consistent where ever possible. Once you found a good mode of presentation, try to stick with it for all your items. It makes for a professional looking portfolio and establishes you as a brand. It also helps when your items are easily recognizable as being your items anywhere on the site.

2. Main Preview Image

   Once your thumbnail has done its magic on a user and drawn him/her in to take a closer look at your item, your preview image must seal the deal for your. Even when someone is not really looking to buy an items, it may still earn you a bookmark, verbal promotion or even land you a job. What you show on your preview image is essentially up to your own judgement. Keep in mind also that these images will popp up on google as thumbnails so don’t make them too long or complicated because they won’t generate any clicks then.

   • For 3D models there are 2 pieces of information that should always be on there: The best quality rendering of your model that you can achieve and a clay rendering with wireframe. I can never stress enough how important wireframe renderings are!
   • For Textures it is important to show a rendering of the texture in context as well as a section of the actual resolution and the map types included. Simply displaying an image of a texture won’t get you noticed.
   • Materials: Something has yet to be written here
   • Concepts: Something has yet to be written here
   • 3DPrint: Something has yet to be written here
   • Animation: Something has yet to be written here

3. Additional Preview Images

   If you have a complex item or multiple items in your download package, then the Additional preview images will come in handy. Their purpose is to let you show more in depth information on your item like detail shots, various angles, different contexts, included content and features and so on.

4. 360 Preview

   Sometimes a nice 360 turnaround can communicate a lot of information about your model and give the viewer a better sense of its overall proportions and volume. It is mostly for high poly objects that can not be viewed in real time via a browser viewer. As with all the preview material, be sure to put effort into your renderings to get the best out of this feature. Remember to name your images in sequence (the easiest is to name them 01.jpg – 24.jpg as this ensures you have exactly 24 frames). To achieve a smooth loop, frame 01 and frame 25 must be identical and NOT frame 01 and frame 24 (even though frame 25 will not be in the upload zip)! Another thing to pay attention to are the animation curves. To get a constant animation speed in your 360 rotation, your animation curve should look like example A. If your curve looks like example B, your animation will speed up in the beginning and slow down towards the end of the loop. 

5. Unity Preview

   Something about this has yet to be written!

6. Video Preview

   Video Previews must not be shorter then 3o frames, else the player will not work. It is a good idea to showcase your animation from multiple angles, a couple of loops at a time, so they can be viewed without the interruption of the player restarting the video after every loop. Showcase your animations directly on the biped rather then a rigged character as that may be distracting.

7. Item description

   Give your items a good description. Remember that the item description field is used by search engines like google! Putting plenty of related keywords there is like free advertising for your item. While it is not allowed to just list keywords in your item description, you can be clever about building them into your text.  It is a good idea to have at least 2 small paragraphs of text with plenty of keywords in there.

8. Polycount

   This is important information! If we had a way to do so, poly count would be made mandatory on 3DOcean. Alas at the moment all I can do is to keep reminding everyone to please do add your poly count to your items as buyers will be looking for this information and it will be important for an upcoming sorting feature.

9. Tags

   Take a minute to think about what sort of keywords people looking for an item like yours would enter into the search and use them as tag words. Not utilizing this feature will make your file that much harder to find.

Quality Standards

Here is a general definition of criteria that will get your items approved or that might get them rejected if not fulfilled.

1. 3D Models

   • Do NOT triangulate your model unnecessarily. The best topology is useless when you triangulate your model. Also pay close attention to your export settings. A lot of exported .obj and .fbx file formats that are included in download packages arrive in the cue triangulated. The only time one would triangulate a model is if it was a rigged low poly game model.
   • Always double check your exported files by reimporting them to see if everything worked as it should have.
   • Align your object along a straight axis and make sure it is sitting on the 0,0,0 coordinates of your workspace. This makes you models much easier to rig and work with.
   • Make effective use of your geometry and make sure it is clean. Inform yourself about good modeling practices and what good topology is.
   • Name your scene and all object in it in a coherent way.
   • Always include a wireframe rendering in your preview material.
   • Put effort into your item presentation
   • Include all textures used on your model or at least point to where they can be found if you do not have the rights to them.

2. Animation Data

   • TBA. Something has yet to be written about animations here.

3. CG Textures

   • Make textures tile able where ever possible. Use the offset filter in Photoshop to check for texture seams. When creating tile able textures like ground dirt, one should avoid obvious features (like a big stone with grass on it) because it will create an obvious pattern on large areas. This applies to all textures meant for large areas.
   • Include at least one non destructive file format in your download package. (bitmap, raw, png, tiff, tga, gif, psd)
   • All texture sides must be to the powers of 2. This is important because textures that are not to the power of 2 will have seams in game engines that generate mip maps. Having all texture sides to the power of 2 does not mean they have to be square! They could also be 1024 x 2048 pixel or 512 x 4096 pixel and the texture sides would still be to the power of 2. It makes it easier to scale uvs when applying textures to objects (because you can scale them by 200%, 50%, 25%, … along the x or y axis and this eliminates texture stretching. If a texture is not square, it will automatically be stretched by default when you apply it to an object, so having square textures is preferable because it will save an extra work step later on.
   • Put effort into your presentation. As mentioned above, it is important to show a rendering of the texture in context as well as a section of the actual resolution and the map types included. Simply displaying an image of a texture won’t get you noticed.

4. Materials And Shaders

   • Something has yet to be written about materials and shaders here.

5. 2D Concepts

   • Something has yet to be written about concepts here.

6. 3D Print

   • A lot has still to be written about 3D Print here.

One technique I like to use to improve my stock output is double dippin’. What do I mean by that? I mean do the work once and get paid for it twice or more. Here’s an example: One of my very first stock items was an illustration of a clock face. Most authors would stop there and move on to the next file. Instead, I created a Flash version of the clock. With the same graphics and similar code I built a set of Flash timezone clocks. ActionScript is pretty similar to JavaScript so I also built a Unity3d version and have a jQuery one in the works. Did I stop there? No, that same clock is on the wall of my Flash Fine Art Gallery. Did I stop there? Well… yes, but I’m sure it’ll show it’s face again on the Envato marketplaces.

You may be saying – “That’s all fine and good, but how does this apply to me?” This concept can work on just about all of the marketplaces. It even makes sense between different files on the same marketplace. Here are some double dippin’ ideas:

WordPress, HTML, and Flash Developers

1. Create customizable scrollbars, contact forms, and image galleries (in classes if you’re using Flash).
2. Reuse modified versions in every theme or template you create. If necessary, improve them, but try not to start from scratch unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Unity3d Developers & 3d Modelers

The Unity3d category on ActiveDen and the 3d Model category on 3dOcean go hand in hand. If you create a 3d model and upload it to 3dOcean, why not bring it to life in Unity and sell it on ActiveDen?

Image Galleries

1. Create your gallery.
2. Use screenshots of your other files to populate the gallery in the preview file. First of all, it makes your gallery look nice. Also, even if they don’t buy your gallery, they may still buy your other files!

Textures

Did you know that 3dOcean and GraphicRiver both sell textures? The requirements differ slightly, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t consider uploading all your textures to both sites.

For Anyone

1. Write a premium tutorial for any of the Tuts+ sites.
2. Sell that same tutorial on the Tuts Marketplace.
3. Use what you taught in the tutorial to make a file, add to it to make it unique, and sell it on ActiveDen, 3dOcean, or whatever Envato marketplace it would fit best on.

WordPress, HTML Developers

If your template got accepted to ThemeForest, the design would have to be pretty great. If so, why not upload the design to the PSD Templates category?

This list of examples is by no means complete. I’m sure there are dozens of other ways to double dip. This article is just to get the wheels turning. Just remember, selling stock is all about working efficiently. If you reuse your work, you’ll save time and make more money!

Do you double dip? Show us here: http://activeden.net/forums/thread/do-you-double-dip/33768

You can download our Unity viewer template here. If you don’t already have Unity3d installed on your machine, you will need it to make this viewer work. Grab the 100% free indie version from http://unity3d.com/unity/download/

Step 2. Importing your model into Unity3d

The first step is to import your model. Unity3d accepts numerous file formats, although for our purposes you must export to an .fbx format file because you will need to include your unity package file in the downloadable main zip file of your item. If possible, choose to ‘embed textures’ when you export your model from your 3d modelling package.

Open up the model viewer project in Unity and drag and drop your 3d model file into the Project hierarchy, under the 3dAssets folder. Unity will import the file.

Once the model has imported, it should look something like this in your Project hierarchy:

Step 3. Set up your scale and any animations.

Find your model again in the Project hierarchy and highlight it by clicking on it once. The Inspector window should now show a bunch of properties for your import, such as Scale Factor, Mesh Compression etc. – something like this:

If you need to alter the scale your model imports at, do so here. The default is 0.01, which may be too small. In the screen shot above you can see that it was changed here to 1. The scale you require will depend on the scale you used when you built the model, of course.

If your model has animations, you will need to set them up here too. At the bottom of the inspector, you will see a table (see below). By using the + and – controls you can add or remove animations to or from the list and set up their start and end frames. The animation interface will not function unless your animations are set up here.

Once you are happy with your import settings, hit Apply.

Step 3.5 Add textures if they’re missing

When you export your model from your 3d modelling package, you should have the option to embed the textures. This is certainly the easiest method for getting textures on your models when you bring them into Unity, but if for some reason that doesn’t happen you can always add textures from within the Unity editor.

To import textures, drag and drop them in. We’ve provided a 2dAssets folder if you’d like to drop them in there, but it’s totally up to you. Just make sure you can find them easily after you drop them in to Unity.

Once you have your textures in Unity, click on the model in the Project window to show its properties in the Inspector window. Look for its shader(s):

Applying textures to your shaders is as easy as dragging the texture into the small area that reads ‘None(Texture2D)’ or clicking on the Select button. Choose a shader from the drop down if you would like to use something other than a Diffuse. You can also bring in your own shaders, but that’s beyond the scope of this document.

Step 4. Open the ‘main’ scene and bring in your model

Unity3d uses ’scenes’ to represent each level of a game. In the case of this viewer, we only have one scene and it is called ‘main’. Look in the Project window to find it and double click to open it:

Once the scene is open, you should see the 3docean logo and a ‘reset camera’ button in the Game window. Everything else is black, since there is no model in this scene yet.

Take a look at the Hierarchy window and notice that there is an object called ‘ADD YOUR MODEL AS CHILD TO THIS OBJECT’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you are going to add your model as a child to that object. To do this, simply find your model in the Project window and drag it over to the ‘ADD YOUR MODEL AS CHILD TO THIS OBJECT’ object in the Hierarchy window. It will highlight when you are over it, so drop it there. It should end up looking something like this:

Your model should be positioned at 0,0,0. If your pivot is off-centre, you can still use the Unity editor to reposition it correctly by using the controls in the top left of the window, or by typing the position manually into the Inspector window once the model is selected in the Hierarchy.

Hit the Play button for a preview of how the viewer will work. If you’re using Unity 2.xx, the play button is located at the top of the window in the centre. If you are using Unity 3, the play button is at the bottom left of the window.

Step 5. Set up the camera and options

The camera will automatically position itself when the viewer is running. By default, the distance from the centre of the world to the camera is 10 units. You can change this value easily if you find it unsuitable.

First, press Stop if the project is still running. It is important to make sure that the player isn’t running when you make changes – if the player is running when you make changes, it will not save them and all changes will be lost.

Then, find the ‘ADD YOUR MODEL AS CHILD TO THIS OBJECT’ object in the Hierarchy. Click on it to highlight it in the editor. The Inspector should show something like this:

In the Inspector window, you can see ‘Cam Space Distance’. This is that distance from the world centre value mentioned above.

Change the ‘Cam Space Distance’ value and hit Play to see how the change looks. NOTE: If you change the value when the player is running, it will not save the change.

By default, animations play once and stop. If you would like them to loop, check the ‘Loop Animation’ property in the Inspector window here.

Step 6. Building the viewer and exporting the unity package

The kind folks at Unity have made building a web player really easy. First, hit play one last time to make sure that everything looks right and that you are happy with it.

Now, select the File menu and then ‘Build and Run’. Choose a folder and a filename to save the viewer as, then hit ‘Build and Run’.

Unity should build the player and open up the browser to show you exactly how the final player looks.

After building the viewer you will end up with one .html file and one .unity3d file. To get the player up onto 3DOcean, you must rename the .html file to index.html and put both files in a .zip folder and upload that to the “Unity Preview” slot on the model upload page.

You must also include the Unity asset in your main ZIP file for download. To export the unity asset for your main ZIP file follow these steps:

1. Once your model is implemented in the viewer and works as it should, you must select it and its dependencies (select the model in the project list and then go to Assets > Select Dependencies) and then export it as a unity package via , Assets > Export Package.
2. The Export Package window will pop up, showing you all the files that are related to your selected model like textures and materials. If all is correct, click the export button and choose a name and location for your export and click save.
3. What you get is a unity asset file (.unitypackage) that you must include in your main ZIP file for download

Step 7. Extra eye candy

The eye candy is all up to you! There are a couple of things included in the viewer to help you, though.

Unity ships with some royalty free light flares and skybox images. Although adding these to the viewer is not something we are going to get into in this document, they are there if you are feeling brave enough to figure them out!

There is a default lighting setup in here that you may need to scale or tweak. If you want to set up the lighting, you will find the default set up in the Hierarchy as a child of the Main_Camera object (which in turn is a child of Camera_Pivot). By default, there are two directional lights, a fill list and a point light:

Note that as long as the lights are parented to the camera (that Main Camera object), they will move around with the camera. If you want the lights to remain in position, drag the Lights away from any potential parent objects.

Adding other eye candy, like particle effects or shaders etc., is beyond the scope of this document, though needless to say Unity is very good at dealing with them. If you use shaders and intend to distribute them, please ensure that you are allowed to do so and remember the rules we have on copyright.

When you are done pimping out your model viewer, do try to remember that not everyone who tries to view it may have a super computer. In fact, it’s quite likely that there will be a huge number of people with older systems that may want to check out the viewer. In which case, perhaps the state of the art shaders, terrain and particle effects etc. might be a bad idea. Keep it simple!

Delving further into Unity3d Your best resources for delving further into Unity can be found on the Unity website or over on the Unity forums. Start here http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Unity%20Basics.html

Troubleshooting

In theory, if you have followed the instructions in this document carefully there should be little that could go bad. The most common problems will most likely be caused by mistakes in the hierarchies. Before contacting support, please go through this document a second time to be 100% sure that everything is as it is outlined here.

If you are having problems with clipping, it may be that your model is too small and that the import scale needs adjusting up. Clipping problems could look something like this:

If the model is importing wrongly, try importing the file back into your 3d package to be sure that the fault doesn’t come from the actual export. If re-importing into the 3d package is successful, recheck the compatible files listing on the Unity website http://unity3d.com/unity/features/asset-importing

For help with animations, be sure to follow the guidelines from the Unity website http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Character-Animation.html

For Maya, there is a free tutorial entitled ‘Complete Maya to Unity Workflow’ worth watching here http://lesterbanks.com/2010/04/complete-maya-to-unity-workflow-tutorial/