How to become a Sketchfab Rockstar: Tell a great story

This is the second post in the Sketchfab Rockstar series which focuses on how to reach a larger audience for your work on Sketchfab.

In this post we’re looking at ways to further engage your audience by adding a story to your model and making sure people will find it in the right place.

Don’t forget to check out the other articles in the series too:

So you have published your new work, tweaked the material settings, and added camera effects? It’ll look brilliant by now, but you’re not done! You have to make sure people will find your work in the right place and when they do, you need to talk to them about your work. Remember: everything is about telling stories, through your models but also through everything around them.

Let’s see how you can tell a great story on Sketchfab!

Your story starts with a strong title. By default, Sketchfab will use the model’s filename, but ‘test22’ may not be as inviting as ‘Low poly Templar Knight’, right?

Add a story to the model description. Talk about your inspiration to create this work, the technical challenges or the software that you used. You can also use hyperlinks in the description to link to other models on Sketchfab or to link to external websites.

Adding more ‘depth’ to your work this way will increase the engagement with your audience, resulting in more conversations with them and deeper exploration of your other work.

Keep in mind that model descriptions have a maximum length of 256 characters.

Complete your Sketchfab profile. The story doesn’t end with your model: people who like your work will often check out your profile page, so make sure you upload an avatar image and fill out your biography, location and skills of your profile.

Which profile do you think is more attractive?

Now that all of your story is in place there’s one thing left to do: find the right place on Sketchfab for your model. By placing your model in one or more categories and adding some tags you will make it easier to find in galleries and through browsing from model to model by clicking on a category or a tag.

These galleries collect the most popular work and also list ‘top contributors’, so it’s well worth getting on them! For examples of these, check out the galleries for the Character category or the Diorama tag.

Categories and tags are very similar, but categories are a fixed list while tags are free-form. It’s best to always use a mix of both.

Pro-tip: Add annotations to highlight points of interest about your work or to create a ‘virtual tour’ around it. This will help you tell a stronger story with your model. You can add an ‘annotation autopilot‘’ to automatically play back your annotations.

I’ll see you again next week when we’ll look offering downloadable models!

– Bart

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