Project MooseTiger (Hack Fort 2016)

Over the last 2 weeks, Team MooseTiger have been hacking away at better previews of your 3D models and Fonts.

Some of you may already know what Hack Fort is about, but for those that don’t, it is essentially a small period dedicated to innovative ideas. Every few months, we take a break from our important project work and give our small ideas a chance at life. We don’t abandon our important project work, but we do believe that all ideas should be given a fair go.

Problem To Solve

Our 3d Model and Font authors have done some fantastic work and we wanted to spend our hack fort time figuring out how best to showcase your hard work. Currently, there is no effective way to visualise this rich media in the same fidelity we can with other mediums (such as audio/video/themes/etc). Authors have had to rely on static images and descriptive slabs of text to convey why a customer should choose this work for their project.

We’re hoping that better visualisations will help our customers find what they are looking for faster, and help our reviewers review your work faster.

What We’ve Done

For your 3D models, we’ve integrated SketchFab’s 3D model viewer (https://sketchfab.com)

You can see it in action on these models:








For your fonts, we’ve built a font preview service. You will be able to see a preview of your own fonts, warts and all, provided you’ve signed in. We’ve handpicked a couple of fonts to showcase the viewer publicly, and intend to include more fonts very soon.

These fonts have public previews available:


What You Need to do

“Hey! I’m a 3D model author! How can I get some of this magic on my items?”

There are a few steps you need to take to enable the 3d viewer on your items:

  1. Sign up for a SketchFab account (https://sketchfab.com/signup).

  2. Upload your 3d models, if you get stuck, checkout SketchFab’s FAQ (https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/categories/200215339).

  3. Be sure to disable downloads on your SketchFab models.

  4. Grab the model ID (the last part of the URL: https://sketchfab.com/models/YourModelId).

  5. Edit your Market Item and set the Sketchfab Model ID to your model’s ID.

“Why isn’t my font’s preview public?”

We haven’t yet figured out how best to select which font to preview, and, while we make a good guess as to which font to use in the preview, we dont always get it right. You can specify which font (or fonts) that are in your item that you want to preview:

  1. Edit your Market Item.

  2. Set the Font Preview Filename value to the font file (in the zip) that you want to show off.

Future Improvements

We’re hoping to get these previews integrated into the category pages so that we can help our customers get the information they need faster.

9 Likes

It’s a great initiative for Font and 3D item author and buyers.
Many thanks to the Envato Team.

Awesome additions I have to say, nice work!!