Poly Haven
patreon
Changes to how Patrons can make suggestions
🕑 Added 2023-03-24 13:14:26 +0000 UTCWe like to get feedback from you guys about what we could be working on - what types of assets are most useful or missing from our library.
We do listen to everyone's suggestions on social media, but we also like to have a way to prefer feedback from the people supporting us (i.e. you!) - to give you guys a legitimate way to directly influence the content on polyhaven.com (other than just paying for it of course!).
Previously we had a Trello board where patrons could add suggestions and vote on other people's ideas, but we found this to have two main problems:
- It wasn't used much. Over the 6 years the board has been up, the most-voted suggestion (night HDRIs) has only 18 votes.
- The most voted suggestions were also mainly old - since they've been there the longest, they had the most time to gather votes - regardless of whether we'd already addressed them or not. This didn't feel like a good representation of the most popular requests.
Instead, and we've already been doing this a while, we'd like to get feedback from you guys (patrons specifically) primarily from focused polls and surveys - every now and then we have a specific question to ask, like what theme to work on next. Once a year or so we also have a generic survey about what assets you're looking for (looks like we're overdue for another one!).
In addition to patron feedback, we still feel it's important to listen to what everyone else is saying, both on social media and by (anonymously) tracking searches on our site. Generally we can gather more data this way, and we can get a better idea of what would be most useful to most people. I'm working on making this data available publicly on our stats page, both for transparency's sake and just because I like to share what I find interesting.
That said, you're of course always welcome to reach out to us and give us ideas :) there's no wrong way to share your suggestions.
-Greg
Comments
Krystal Camprubi
seems perfect :-)
Poly Haven
For now, based on past votes and other feedback, we're focusing on nature assets in a few different biomes. Once we get a bit more comfortable with the workflow of going out as a team and scanning environments, we'll likely put a few location ideas to vote and see what you guys want the most :) Edit: In the meantime, there's nothing stopping people voting for a viking town in the next community project, I think that'd be really fun to work on.
Poly Haven
Good ideas :) Personally a desert scene is at the top of my list as well, so Namibia will likely be the first place we go once we've worked out the kinks in our environment scanning workflow locally. For models, asside from the environment assets we're working on, the community projects are meant to help address this over time. In the Shed project, we get almost 50 new assets, which is a big boost from what we had before. We just need to keep doing that :) There needs to be a balance between specialization and generalization. For the next few months, the core full-time team is speecializing in nature assets since that's what we're most interested in and what we see the most need in (based on both patron feedback and public requests). But we're also keeping the community projects going to keep things diverse, getting contractors to scan whatever textures and HDRIs they feel like, and developing workflows that will not only help us scan nature assets but fabrics and wood surfaces as well.
Krystal Camprubi
I agree with Justin about picking very specific niches. Also about focusing on 3D models (even if, God I like so much your textures !!!). Some area are totally missing in 3D. For example : You can find a lots of things about Vikings. But all of them are about battles. You can find a hundred of blades but good luck if you want to make another kind of picture about everyday vikin tribes : like some musician playing the sutton hoo lyre or a viking women weaving a belt on some ancient weaving device. There are simply NOTHING about that aspect. I could say this on almost every topics : you can find a lots of armor pieces for medieval history scenes, some real, some from imaginary. But almost nothing about medieval harnesses. If you want to depict Arthurian mythology, you can barely find Lancelot heraldic symbols. These are just samples. I just want to point out there are really "missing areas" in 3D, in whatever topic you choose. Assuming that Polyhaven works with a community system, I would first spot some themes that could be enthousiastic enough for the followers to be involved. Then, I would spot the missing area into that topics and I would try to fill the gaps... Why not using a vote system to find the topics in the first place ? Thank you for asking to your community. Once again, I really enjoy the sharing spirit of polyhaven team. (and sorry for my bad english :-))
Justin Zander
Nothing specific, but maybe you can you look into recent tech / game demos for inspiration? Assets from them (or similar) tend to be really popular. For example a desert scene like the Unreal demo (or maybe a real world location like Petra?). Another idea is to add what you're missing. You have 636 HDRIs, but only 363 textures, and just ~216 models. You could focus on adding models in missing categories. Yet another idea is to super-specialize. You could pick a specific niche and go (almost) all-in on that. Bonus points if nobody else does it well / cheaply / free.
