Another Epic MegaGrant

Epic Games has granted us a $25,000 Megagrant for the purposes of creating more assets and improving usability of our assets in Unreal.

You may remember we received another smaller grant 2 years ago when starting 3D Model Haven, so clearly they like what we're doing and want to help us succeed :)

We submitted the application almost a year ago when starting Poly Haven, and received approval just a few weeks ago.

What we plan to use these funds for specifically:

1. Savings

About $4,200 will go towards our long-term “emergency savings” account, which intends to ensure we can survive any unexpected fluctuations in income, such as the issues we had with AdSense earlier this year, and continue to sustainably publish assets nearly every day.

2. More Textures

We plan to hire Meat for another year or so to shoot textures for us regularly, and possibly start photoscanning models as well.

While Meat’s been working with us for the whole year so far, we’ve been paying him using past savings and partially from my own pocket. Without the Epic Grant, we wouldn’t be able to continue and texture uploads would slow down significantly next year.

3. Unreal & Non-Blender Support

We’ve started investigating and testing how we can improve usability of our assets in Unreal and other non-Blender software.

Our current plan is to make all models available in FBX format as well as GLTF, and add a customizable ZIP download option for textures. This should mean that anyone using any software that supports PBR materials should be able to use any of our assets (without having to download the Blend and export it themselves).

We also plan to experiment with publishing assets on the Unreal Marketplace, which may ease usability in-engine further.

Blender will remain our primary software, what we use to create assets and what we publish for.

“Just a Grant”

While it’s true that taking money from Epic influences our decision to support Unreal better, the fact is that we’ve always wanted to allow non-Blender users to use our assets, and the Unreal community is logically the next largest (and most similar) audience that we should actively support. This grant effectively just allows us to speed up our existing plans a bit, and sustain what we’re already doing.

We’re also going about it in a way that benefits other software users too, by providing intermediary formats (FBX/GLTF) instead of only native formats.

It’s understandable that some of you might be a little worried about Epic’s influence over us, given their polarized and increasingly corporate reputation, but you can rest assured that this grant is a “no strings attached” kind of deal. We have no obligation to do what Epic tells us, and are more or less free to use the funds in whatever way we deem best in order to accomplish the goals explained above.

Speaking of goals...

New Donation Goal?

Our current donation goal on the site is about $1000/m away, and reads:

“More Textures: At this level, we could afford to hire someone part-time to shoot more textures for us regularly, expanding the variety that we have available.”

Hiring Meat regularly was exactly what this Goal was about, and now that the Megagrant is covering it for the next year, I think we need a new goal!

I’ll be thinking about this for the next few days/weeks and make another post about it here when I have something to share or need some more feedback. In the meantime, please let me know in the comments below or on Discord what you think we should aim for next :)