SFMLab, Open3DLab and Smutbase

In this site update, we discuss some of the new features that have shipped in the year so far. In addition, we provide context for the AI self-attestation tools that have been added to the sites, and how they should be interpreted and used. Read more on our site.

When did we have our last development roundup? Oh wow. Over a year ago? Jeez. Well, let's share about a year of updates with you then! (This post is mirrored from https://open3dlab.com/news/development-roundup-summer-2025/ ) The end of 2024 was marked by highs and lows. After a year filled with unfo

Hey everyone, over the past few weeks, I've been working on the site search for all three websites. This has obviously caused some frustration for a lot of you, as the new search hasn't been as specific as it was before. This is because search is actually quite difficult, the larger the dataset beco

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Hey everyone, Firstly, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. It's been a while since the last developm

Summary A series of data loss events occurred between April 10th and 13th at Open3DLab, following a server cluster update. The new database management system that's been put in use has been most reliable, but unfortunately I still had to learn a lot in terms of monitoring and recovering from failure

Hello everyone, After a long delay, the Open3DLab connection with SubscribeStar has finally been established. If you're supporting the site through Open3DLab, you can now connect your SubscribeStar account to receive benefits. You can connect your account through this page: https://open3dlab.com/acc

Hello everyone, By now, you've probably heard about the controversy around X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The company's owner has been making some erratic decisions with regard to the operating platform. In the community, a lot of people have expressed concerns regarding the direction he

Two days ago, I reported on an incident related to the webhook connection between the Open3DLab sites and Patreon. (Read the full story here) The error (caused by Patreon) resulted in our Patreon subscribers no longer being able to access their benefits on Open3DLab. Since communication with Patreon

Dear Patrons, I am writing to inform you about an unexpected issue that occurred two days ago, on July 12th, that has affected some of our Patreon users' ability to access their benefits on Open3DLab. I want to explain in simple terms what has happened and what steps we are taking to resolve this pr

Hi everyone. Firstly, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. I am excited to share my recent experience

Hello everyone, I would like to inform you that I will be performing extended maintenance on Saturday, March 4th, 2023. This maintenance is necessary to improve the performance and reliability of our website in the long term. This maintenance involves the migration of web and database servers to a d

Hi everyone, Many people have mentioned in the past that they remember downloading a certain file, but can't find easily the original on the site. Today, I deployed a new "download history" feature to address this. You can find yours under the "Download History" menu options in your account settings

Hi everyone. Firstly, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. Happy new year of 2023! Let's jump right i

Hi everyone. Firstly, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. Wow. It's been a while. Half a year has pa

Unity is an engine that's used for many games. So how do we get to the models and textures? With some publicly available tools, of course! Check out how it works in this latest video! How to extract Unity models (YouTube)

I messed up. Please watch the video for clarification. My Worst Mistake as a Site Admin (YouTube)

UPDATE 2022-04-02: This was part of an elaborate April Fools joke. You can find some clarification on the followup post. For years, SFMLab and Smutbase have been kept running thanks to our excellent uploaders and wonderful supporters. Operating a site is costly, and time consuming. And funding such

Hi everyone. First of all, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. It's been a while since the last upda

If you didn't already know; there is a Youtube channel! Subscribe if you haven't already. This is the first in a small "Behind the Scenes" series I want to make about what it takes to run the site. Since COVID restrictions have lifted, I'm more free to move around and will soon visit the datacenter

Hi everyone, First of all, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. Download throttling As some users may

Hi everyone, First of all, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. First update of the year 2021 feels l

For new Patrons: connect your Patreon account to your Open3DLab/Smutbase/SFMLab and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. Hi everyone, Today, the 31st of December 2020, I would like to thank all of the Patrons who have supported the site this year. This has been an especially trying and stressful

Welcome to the new Patrons, and thank you all for your continued support. Here's a quick follow-up to the previous November update. As mentioned in previous updates: With the storage issues last summer, the EU0 server became much more expensive to keep around. That's why we got the new EU1 hardware

Hi everyone, First of all, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits. Site and Server happenings This month

Hi everyone, First of all, I want to welcome and thank all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. Your support allows me to spend more time on the site and pay for the operating costs. If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your b

TLDR: I discuss the site goings on since March, and sum up the numerous features and site improvements, like the Migration, the upload process, Verified uploaders, automated upload validation and other ongoing improvements. I also talk about some of the site performance issues of the past few months

Hi everyone, It's been a busy month, but we're almost out of the woods. You may have noticed some major changes and severe service disruption over the past few weeks. To those who asked, my answers have been terse and vague. The banner on the homepage explained little, and naturally that had people

SFMLab was created in late January of 2014. Has it really been that long? I'm frankly astounded that the site has lasted this long. It wouldn't have been possible without your support. Thank you so much. It's unfortunate that Valve has not pushed substantial updates to Source Filmmaker in almost as

Hi, and a happy 2019 to all of you! Even thought the new year has only just started, it's already looking to be the most difficult year for the internet to date. Government and corporate censorship are around every corner, and we must fight for our right to an open and free internet. So in these try

SFMLab and Smutbase will suffer from reduced availability in the next 48 hours due to changes to the loadbalancing setup. Summary of the changes: - New web nodes will be configured - DNS will change to a different loadbalancer (can take 24-48 hours to propagate to your provider) - SSL Certificates w

Both Smutbase and SFMLab will be down for maintenance for a short time, starting now. Should not take more than an hour to complete. Update: Maintenance has been completed.

SFMLab/Smutbase database server will be undergoing some quick maintenance, which may result in reduced connectivity or downtime. Should only last a few minutes but you never know! *knocks on wood*

I've begun the process of pruning user accounts that were registered with disposable email addresses such as mailinator, among others. If you are using such email accounts, you should consider signing up with a non-disposable address instead.

Time for another site update. This month, several updates have been pushed to the site. Most of them have to do with data collection and privacy. So what's been happening? There's one thing that's been on SFMLab for a long time. It is a Google Analytics script, that's been silently gathering your da

Hey guys, I'm gonna be pushing some experimental changes to SFMLab and Smutbase tonight. If the site is less responsive or unreachable, just let me know through the #bugs-and-features channel on the Discord server. Also, if any of you missed the last post regarding the SFMLab Gold April fools thing,

Hello to all the new patrons! Welcome to SFMLab Gold! This is where you get to find out that you got pranked! Last year, on April fools, I took down the entire site to make a point about operating costs of SFMLab. This year I took it a step further by introducing a fake premium subscription service

Hey everyone, here's a cool project I'd like to highlight. It's not directly related to SFM, but it might be relevant to some of you. A lot of model makers use Blender to port models to the Source Engine. Blender is a free and open source 3D creation tool that is developed by a group of volunteers f

SFMLab will be down for urgent kernel upgrades. Estimated downtime should not exceed 60 minutes and will most likely be completed sooner. Update: maintenance has been completed

SFMLab has just received the greatest revamp in at least two years. Please report any issues you may encounter. I hope you'll all enjoy the new look. Hopefully, it will have been worth the wait! https://sfmlab.com/

Hi everyone, Today I added a feature to SFMLab that many people have asked for since the site has launched. Basically, all furry/anthro content is now hidden by default, similarly to how the NSFW filter works. This also includes content that falls into certain fandoms that are not necessarily consid

As a result of Microsoft's rate limiting policies and the high number of signups we get from hotmail/live/outlook addresses, SFMLab's Password reset/activation mail system is less reliable than usual. Unfortunately there isn't much we can do about this on our end. Microsoft's policies are what they

Please report any issues!

The new SF server is setup and almost done retrieving all the files. It's still syncing some of the larger packs and it will take a few hours before those will be done syncing. The SF server will be switched over to the new setup pretty soon. On an unrelated note, I'm hoping to cleanup the SFMLab co

Now with HTTPS! https://zero.sfmlab.com/ SF server will follow soon.

The US download servers are unavailable for new downloads at this time. And unlike two days ago, there's a legitimate reason! The US servers have maxed out their disk space. This obviously results in new uploads not syncing to the servers, meaning that only the EU downloads work. I will be fixing th

Hey everyone, As you probably already figured out: SFMLab is fine. The site was never really gone, I'm doing fine financially, am not wanted by the authorities and SFMLab was never in danger of getting shut down. If you were even a slight bit observant, you will have noticed the hidden link (omega.s