Sketchfab's viewer is based on PBR (Physically Based Rendering) methodology.
Materials
Sketchfab supports multiple materials and objects in your scene. Give each material a unique name because the 3D editor merges objects by material name. Avoid special characters when naming.
If possible, you should join every mesh that shares a material because it helps performance.
Colors
If you are not using texture images, you can choose a color for any slot from the color picker.
See also Vertex Colors.
Textures
Textures are images mapped to the surface of your model. For details on shaders/texture slots, see Materials (PBR).
Importing
Upload textures with your model file or embed textures in the model file (e.g. .BLEND, .FBX). You can put image files in the same folder/directory as the model file, or a sub folder/directory. If your textures are properly referenced by the model file or use our naming conventions, they will be automatically applied to your model.
If you need to add textures after uploading, you can use the texture manager or drag and drop images into their slots in the material editor.
Supported Formats
Different image formats can be used depending on whether you uploaded them together with the model file, or upload them in 3D Settings after the model is processed
During upload:
- .JPG
- .PNG
- .TIFF
- .TGA
- .DDS
- .GIF
- .BMP
- .VTF
In 3D Settings:
- .JPG
- .PNG
- .TGA
Processing & Compression
Textures are compressed to minimize model download times. We convert any image that is not .JPG or .PNG to .PNG. Then, we generate compressed versions of every texture. The format and level of compression depends on the image attributes and channel requirements: RGB, Luminance, or Alpha. We do our best to minimize file size without affecting visual quality.
We also generate multiple resolutions of each texture at every "power of 2" between 32×32 pixels and the original (up to 8192×8192). For example, if you upload a 1024×1024 texture, we will generate 32, 64, 128, 256, and 512 versions. Depending on your device, these are used in "LD" and "SD" modes in the viewer.
Textures are re-processed each time you change Material settings, with a small delay. This can take 10-15 minutes to complete. 3D Settings always uses full resolution, uncompressed textures.
If you experience issues with compression artifacts, especially on normal maps ("blocky" or "pixelated" textures, please see this post.
Automatic PBR Mapping
Use our texture naming conventions to help us automatically choose settings and apply textures to the right shader slots. The format is "MaterialName_suffix.extension". For example, if you have a material named "Material1", you could name your textures like "Material1_diffuse.png", "Material1_metallic.png", etc.
Avoid material names with special characters, especially periods '.', underscores '_', and hyphens '-' because it can break the match.
Avoid material names with matching substrings, for example "handle" and "woodenhandle" in the same scene.
If the model has only one material, we will apply textures based on the shader name match regardless of the material's name or the position of the string in the name of the image file.
These are the strings we look for in the suffix:
- Diffuse / Albedo / Base Color: 'diffuse', 'albedo', 'basecolor'
- Metalness: 'metalness', 'metallic', 'metal', 'm'
- Specular: 'specular', 'spec', 's'
- Specular F0: 'specularf0', 'f0'
- Roughness: 'roughness', 'rough', 'r'
- Glossiness: 'glossiness', 'glossness', 'gloss', 'g', 'glossy'
- AO: 'ambient occlusion', 'ao', 'occlusion', 'lightmap', 'diffuseintensity'
- Cavity: 'cavity'
- Normal Map: 'normal', 'nrm', 'normalmap'
- Bump Map: 'bump', 'bumpmap', 'heightmap'
- Emission: 'emission', 'emit', 'emissive'
- Opacity: 'transparency', 'transparent', 'opacity', 'mask', 'alpha'
- Subsurface Scattering: 'scattering', 'subsurface'
- Subsurface Translucency: 'translucency', 'thickness'
- Clear Coat: 'clearcoat'
- Clear Coat Roughness: 'clearcoat roughness'
- Clear Coat Normal Map: 'clearcoat normal map'
Troubleshooting
- Make sure you include the image files with the upload, and the .MTL file when uploading .OBJ.
- Make sure the path and file names linking the textures are correct.
- Try uploading your textures manually in 3D settings.
- If applying a texture does nothing, or seems to apply a solid color, this can indicate a UV-mapping problem.
- 3D scans and models with baked lighting often look best in Shadeless mode.
- Avoid spaces and special characters in your material, texture, and file names. Name everything with ASCII / UTF-8 compliant characters.
- Avoid image sizes bigger than 8192×8192 pixels.
- Avoid image file sizes bigger than 10MB.
- Avoid color spaces like CMYK.
For performance tips, see Viewer Performance.
Filtering
There are four options for texture filtering.
- Trilinear: Usually the best choice, especially for large textures.
- Nearest (mipmap): Can be useful for block textures like Minecraft blocks and pixel art with very small textures
- Bilinear: Can be useful for masking and hiding texture seams
- Nearest: Legacy, use Nearest (mipmap) instead.
Color Formats
Depending on the shader slot you're working with, you'll see different color encoding options under Format:
- RGB: Red, Green, and Blue color channels
- Alpha: Alpha transparency channel only
- Luminance: R channel only
By choosing the appropriate format, texture opacity can be encoded either as an alpha mask or by grayscale levels.
UV Channels
If you have more than one UV channel on a single material, you will see an additional interface option to switch between them.
UV Offset and Tiling
UV Offset and Tiling are not currently supported.
Texture Wrap Modes
Texture UV coordinates (u, v) map to surface ST coordinates (s, t). UV coordinate values can only range from (0, 0) to (1, 1), so there are several ways to wrap a surface with a texture. Mapping options can be changed with Wrap S and Wrap T:
- Repeat: The texture is tiled (2.6 → 0.6)
- Mirror: The texture is mirrored (1.2 → 0.8)
- Clamp: Texture pixels outside the [0, 1] range will be clamped to the border of the texture
3rd Party Rendering Engines
Proprietary renderers/shaders like V-Ray, Mental Ray, Corona, Arnold, etc. should have their lighting and textures baked for best results. The 3ds Max Exporter, for example, is able to bake materials and upload to Sketchfab automatically.
We encourage KeyShot users to use version 10+ to export glTF. See KeyShot.
Comments
97 comments
Is it actually possible to bake lighting and texture from Keyshot, googling would seem to suggest not?
@overthere - I've done quite a bit of googling myself, I also think not...
booo, making fbx not have texture is like not having water in the ocean.
@bigattck - I'm not sure what you mean. We completely support textures in FBX, just not the specific "FbxLayeredTexture" http://help.autodesk.com/view/FBX/2015/ENU/?guid=__cpp_ref_class_fbx_layered_texture_html
Hello James. Have a Sketchfab support import model with animation like a FBX Review? Its realy will be great for show 3d porfolio for animators.
Hi Kirill,
Not yet, but animation is a big milestone for us in the future!
Can I pack textures to chanels ?? R-metallic, G-spec, B - ao etc. Les memory better performance special on web and mobile devices. Now im working with simple matcap shader that use only "Normalmap" and im using only R+G for normals, B is ambient and A is alpha.
@KrzysztofZwolinski - Not completely, but it's something we might implement in the future. You can do it with a few specific slots. Alpha Blending/Alpha Masking can use Alpha (A) or Luminance (R). Emission can use Luminance (R), and Base Color/Albedo can use Luminance (R).
Hi James, could i use animated textures in future? say upload a small gif for a blinking eye , or a short looping video clip to play on a TV on an exhibition stand or similar?
@clockworxdesign - Yes, it's something we're experimenting with.
Hello can anyone tell me which type of normal map is accepted in Sketchfab, DirectX (X+, Y-, Z+) or OpenGL (X+, Y+, Z+) ?
@iqs99 - We offer an "Invert Y" option in the normal map channel in order to support both formats:
How to set in MTL file Diffuse / Albedo, Metalness, Specular, Roughness, Glossiness, Ambient Occlusion, Cavity, Normal, Bump, Emission, Opacity? Where an example?
@degit22 - You need to set your texture names like they are defined above:
https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/articles/202600873-Textures-Materials-Formats#obj
@James - Before update work suffixes. Now textures do not automatically choose.
@degit22 - Ah, I'm sorry. I think it might be related to this bug. Could you try the workaround here?
https://forum.sketchfab.com/t/sketchfab-does-not-load-automatically-textures/5535
Unity3d uses specular map from alpha channel. Is it possible to use it right from the texture alpha channel or I should use unique specular map?
@craftworkmobile
For Classic materials, we support RGB and Luminance (R) in the specular slot, but not Alpha (A).
For PBR (Metalness workflow), Specular F0 map is optional, but we expect a linear, grayscale RGB image.
For PBR (Specular workflow), we expect an RGB map in the Specular slot.
So, in your case, yes I think you should use a unique specular map.
I have a klonoa model but when i add his textures his eyes aren't open all the way but his eyes are colored. Someone please help me
Hi @klonoaxlolo - You can make the eyelid materials 100% transparent in 3D Settings: http://puu.sh/ofL3H/8b78d89a0e.jpeg
In agisoft photoscan I can set 'UDIM texture layout' when exporting OBJ. Should I set this or not?
@frankmaraite - I'm not really sure what that option does, but I never set it when I use PhotoScan.
*coughs* So... I don't blame you from laughing at this, but I made a prop last night and was using sketchfab as a previewer while I was working on it at a public PC, so anyway, the computer decided to crashed and the files ended up becoming corrupt. So yeah, I was wondering if there is a way to retrieve my textures when the download property is a .blend file.
@jinkapo - These things happen :)
If you packed the texture in the .blend file before exporting, you should be able to extract them in Blender. If not, you can grab them from Developer Tools > Resources.
Edit: Turn off image compression to make sure you're downloading your original versions and not our processed versions:
https://sketchfab.com/models/f3339e611a5143f88c09b9dfb56a0c7f?image_compression=0
.
@jk76 - looks like you got some answers on the forum?
Why "Invert Y" in the normal map would be a default setting ?
@lukeyu - Because DirectX (-Y) is more common than OpenGL (+Y)
Is it possible to let us to choose "Invert Y" option at once for all materials ?
And according this table (http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_Map_Technical_Details) I think you should use OpenGL as a default
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