Docs suggestion: Pointers to assets

Hi all, I’m about a week into using Babylon.js and I’m loving it. The “batteries included” approach to 3D is great (thanks for not making me write my own WebXR controllers), the documentation is easy to understand, and playgrounds make it easy to find code to borrow from.

The biggest learning curve for me has been figuring out where to get assets – textures, skyboxes, meshes – to use for projects. I’ve spent at least two days scouring the web. I think it would be great if there was a page (or tool) that documented different options for where to get assets. Probably alongside the existing asset library docs. Even better if the documentation includes a link to a guide of how to get the asset format of that source into Babylon.js. Here’s an example of what I’m thinking:

… etc …

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CC @PirateJC

BTW - The updated assets list that babylon offers can always be found herre - Assets/Assets.md at master · BabylonJS/Assets (github.com)

Actually, Google has it :slight_smile:

The matter is that even inside one source the quality of assets may vary a lot. Even paid assets could be poorly done, and vice versa.
There is a very good curated list of awesome things related to the Babylon.js - GitHub - Symbitic/awesome-babylonjs: A curated list of awesome things related to Babylon.js

Most of the GLTF/GLB assets available in the Web (paid or not - it doesn’t matter) need optimization before real (production) use. You may check this tool which I created especially for this purpose - https://glb.babylonpress.org/

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wow! awesome tool! It shrank one test glb with 250 spheres and materials from 262Mb to 46Mb, though it took a bit. [edit: clearer now: it reduced the original from 1023 spheres to 250, retaining a remarkable similarity to original. very cool.]

You may play with different settings of different texture sizes, format and compression, as well as with GLB geometry optimization.
My tool is partially based on GLTF-Transform SDK https://gltf-transform.dev/ , there is also CLI which may be more convenient to batch process a lot of files (when you know the right settings for them, of course :))

Yea, I’m a 3D noob – anyone that’s thinking about production quality doesn’t probably need pointers to assets, but it does seem like it has been mentioned as a golden path for Babylon.js.

Happy to put together a pull request if there is any interest.

Hi and welcome to the Community,
Personally, I think that…

…definetely needs pointers to assets :grin: At least, consider them :thinking: We are all and always in need of good quality assets and things change very quickly.

With that said, I don’t think that it is the role of the framework to make a selection of ‘external sources’ (unless they are partners).

I believe this is also what the forum is for. I actually can recall questions in this very forum like "where do you get n assets from? (free, models, textures, etc…) and people would reply :smiley: I mean, I’m totally open to share my sources with you (and in fact you already listed some in your post).

So in short, I don’t think I would put this in the doc. I also don’t think the BJS team would want this (@PirateJC Do yours?) But then, I could be wrong. And then of course, my opinion only :smiley:

Again, welcome to the Community and I hope you are enjoying your time with our favorite tool/toy :boy: :grin: and meanwhile, have a great day :sunglasses:

@apowers313 thanks so much for the suggestion. While I LOVE the idea of helping the community find assets, this is indeed a tricky subject as @mawa has indicated. The problem mainly lies in the fact that any list that we put together would be stale or outdated pretty quickly after its creation. We’ve actually had various lists like this in previous iterations of our documentation, but we deprecated them largely because they become so outdated so quickly.

I think the problem lies in the fact that the assets that might be publicly available AND have an appropriate license that can be utilized for non-commercial purposes is a pretty fluid list. So staying on top of it is quite challenging. Not to say we’re scared of a challenge :slight_smile: However in this case, going the route of a simple search or asking your friendly neighborhood chatbot, usually provides a pretty up to date list, at a far more relevant cadence than what we could keep up with.

Hope that makes some sense.

We’ll always maintain the core Babylon asset repository that @RaananW mentioned.

Thanks for starting this thread and bringing up the idea!

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