polyhaven.com is live!

Last night we finally launched polyhaven.com, and for the most part everything's gone pretty smoothly :)

You'll find a lot of new models here: https://polyhaven.com/models

There's still work to do to port over some of the nice-to-have features from the old sites before we redirect them to the new site (e.g. tiling preview for textures, 360° view for HDRIs), but here's what's new in terms of functionality:

• Blend file downloads for all textures - you no longer need to download a zip file and set up the material yourself, just download the blend and append the material.

• GLTF files for all textures and models - for those who don't use Blender, GLTF is the best intermediary format. Why not FBX? Because it doesn't work well with materials from Blender, and is closed source. GLTF is the future :)

• EXR and HDR for all HDRIs - why not both! HDR is still what I recommend since it's usually smaller and visually identical, but technically EXR is a better format.

• Download preferences are remembered - if you chose EXR over HDR, or DirectX normals over OpenGL, or 8K instead of 4K, that'll be the default setting for your downloads in future.

• Overhauled category sidebar - better categorization of assets, with nesting sub-categories to narrow down what you're looking for without needing to touch the search bar.

• Faster, looser search - if you do need to touch the search bar, it now updates the page as you type! It's also less strict, including assets that match closely to what you typed.

• Browse all asset types simultaneously - HDRIs, textures and models all on one page!

• Faster navigation - the site is now a "single page application", so more like a piece of software than a collection of web pages. Clicking on links should load really fast (depending on a number of factors), and it should use less data over time.

• Support for more renders for each asset - we can now show arbitrary custom renders for each asset, like wireframes and clay renders, or anything else!

• "Newest Patrons" section on home page - within an hour of joining us on Patreon, your name shows up on the home page :) We'll have an option to opt out of this soon.

• A public open source API for external integrations - not very well documented yet, but perfectly usable if you want to integrate our asset library with your plugin or software. This is the same API the site itself uses.

• Fancy finance reports - things are much more complicated now that we've merged the old Havens, this page summarizes monthly transactions directly from our bank statements.

The delays to launch the site were numerous and unexpected, but I'm really proud of what the team has achieved to get here, and I look forward to filling the site up with assets :)

Our current priorities (in no particular order) are as follows:

• Publish remaining donated assets - most of the assets donated to us are published now, but there are a few special case ones left (e.g. the book collection) that we plan to publish as soon as possible.

• Mobile friendliness - only the home page looks good on mobile, the rest of the site still needs work.

• Scheduling of upcoming assets - we have over 40 assets to publish over the next few months, I need to still create a system to allow scheduling these easily while also providing...

• Early access for patrons - those upcoming assets should be accessible by patrons on the site itself. How to implement this is still an unanswered question.

• Patron sponsorships - $10 patrons can sponsor an asset each month, right now this is facilitated though direct messages on Patreon, but this needs to be automated.

• Contribution page - we want to allow anyone to submit their creation to be published on Poly Haven (following strict review). Systems and documentation needs to be written to manage this.

• API load balancing - performance needs to be monitored on the API, and likely scaled with load balancing.

• Render Gallery - the HDRI Haven render gallery is a huge success and valuable part of the community, it needs to be ported over to Poly Haven... or created as it's own thing?

• Set up AdSense - managing our own ad server has not been feasible for us, so we have to switch back to AdSense to survive.

• Publish source code - like the old Havens, the source code for the site itself will be published. We just need to do a security review before doing this.

Today's a public holiday here in SA, so the team is taking a well-deserved day off :) Tomorrow it's back to tackle those remaining tasks and plan for the future!

Thanks again for everyone's support and patience, it's been a grand adventure so far.