Over Half A Million Free 3D Models On Sketchfab

We are excited to announce that you can now discover and download more than 500,000 free 3D models on Sketchfab! This amazing achievement is all thanks to our generous creative community that continues to grow and grow.

Every day, enthusiastic 3D artists, designers, scientists, architects, museums, and brands are adding to this rapidly expanding library of freely reusable and re-mixable content. With so much incredible content uploaded to Sketchfab on a daily basis, we continuously curate a collection of some of our favorite downloadable models:

Featured Free Downloads by Sketchfab on Sketchfab

Some especially generous community members like Warkarma, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Digital Life 3D make pretty much all of their 3D models available for download—how cool is that?

Back in January of this year (we know, it seems like another time now) we announced an impressive milestone: 300,000 free downloadable models on Sketchfab. Reaching this new milestone so quickly is a testament to the productivity of our members but also confirmation of the huge appetite for high-quality 3D models.

Just noticed we passed 50,000 downloads per day ?

That's 1,500,000 downloads per month ?

? https://t.co/HP9UOrPc2q & https://t.co/bygZmO4TVN pic.twitter.com/f7ekWiGy78

— alban denoyel (@albn) December 9, 2020

How do 3D models get reused?

3D models can support a diverse range of creative and commercial use cases, including VFX for film and TV, video games, still renders, AR & VR, education, and more. One of the best things about making your 3D models available for re-use is seeing the myriad ways that they are reused.

Little did the The Royal Armoury know that their scan of The Parade Shield of King Erik XIV of Sweden would end up in the intro to a Post Malone video that has now been watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Screengrab showing how a 3D scan from a Swedish museum was incorporated into a popular music video. Top left: the original scan on Sketchfab, Bottom right: the scan as seen in the video.

Feel free to ping us on social media if you ever see your own or someone else’s 3D model being re-used in a cool or interesting way—we’ve opened a topic on the forum to help capture and share these examples, too.

Creative Commons Licenses

All freely downloadable models on Sketchfab are shared under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution licenses so that everyone who downloads a 3D model from Sketchfab knows exactly how that asset can be reused. These CC licenses, which all require a proper artist attribution credit, provide value to the original creator who has foregone commercial gain in the spirit of collaborative creativity.

We try hard to make it easy for everyone who uses CC content from Sketchfab to provide proper attribution to model creators. In addition to our Help Center article on the topic, we recently added a button to the on-site download popup, allowing for easy copy-paste of the model’s creator credit:

Sketchfab Free Importer Plugins

The many Sketchfab importer plugins make it easy to download 3D models directly into third party 3D and XR software, thanks to our download API. Sketchfab advocates for automatic creator attribution to be built into integrations so that a creator credit is easily found in the final published experience.

Integrations mean your 3D models may end up in anything from an AR filter on Instagram to a VR chat room on Mozilla Hubs. Thanks to Sketchfab’s automated file conversion features, the glTF files that make many of the importers possible mean that Sketchfab 3D files—complete with animations and material settings—just work.

Bringing some life to a Mozilla Hubs space is as easy as copying and pasting a link to a Sketchfab 3D model!

Needless to say, we are hyped by the opportunities that making 3D models downloadable for free makes possible. What do you think? Let us know in the comments, Forum, and our Discord server.