Sketchfab Comes Alive With Sound

Shhh. Listen, do you hear that? Until now, Sketchfab was silent, but not any more. Today we’re excited to announce the next big step forward for sharing your 3D and VR work with the world – support for sound, a fourth dimension!

To celebrate our community passing one million members, starting today you can now add both ambient (“2D”) and positional (“3D”) audio to any of your existing Sketchfab scenes or anything new you publish moving forward. Your scenes will come to life like never before. Just think of the possibilities: an ambient soundscape to breathe atmosphere into your scene, a voice track providing historical context for your archeological scan, characters brought to life through synched voice tracks.

And like all Sketchfab features – wherever our player goes, our features go with it – allowing you to add audio to scenes and share them on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, portfolio sites and just about anywhere you can think of on the web. The possibilities are endless. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create.

To celebrate our launch, it’s time to share some great examples of how our friends have put the new sound features to use to show you just a small slice of the possibilities:

Lily & Snout – The World’s First WebVR Animated Short

Produced by Sketchfab, Created with Artella

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that over the past two months we’ve been proudly collaborating with the virtual studio platform Artella, on the world’s first WebVR animated short, “Lily and Snout”. Today we are proud to premiere the short with something we’d been keeping secret all along – a full audio soundtrack. The entire production was completed start to finish in 8 weeks. A feat in itself!

“Lily and Snout” is produced by Bobby Beck, former Disney and Pixar animator, and founder of Animation Mentor and Artella, and directed by Tim Rudder currently at Germany’s Studio Soi. The project brought together an incredible team of animators, riggers, modelers, visual artists and – of course – a sound designer and composer from all over the world and from both the Sketchfab and Artella communities.

We’ll have plenty more to share on “Lily and Snout” in the coming days including behind-the-scenes artwork, models and more so stay tuned!

Cultural Institutions

With more than 500 cultural institutions on our platform, these organizations continue to find a very welcome home on Sketchfab with everything from drone-scanned archaeological digs to digitized permanent collections to organizations who are working hard to use photogrammetry to preserve antiquities threatened by war, unrest, or environmental concerns.

The British Museum has updated several of it’s published models by linking existing audio descriptions from their tours. In only a matter of moments and a few clicks the Museum has unified two of its digital offerings and allowed online history enthusiasts the explore objects in full 3D while listening to expert audio descriptions.

Visit The British Museum audio collection to see and hear more examples.

Games

Everyone from AAA publishers to indie bedroom coders continue to benefit from the opportunity to use Sketchfab to market their games. 

You, Our Community

But that’s not all. We’ve also been working behind-the-scenes with the creators of some of the most popular scenes on Sketchfab and over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting the added power audio has brought to some of your favorite finds. To kick things off here is a collection to show you what’s possible. A huge thank you to everyone who joined us during our beta to add audio to their work:

Visit our collection for a round up of audio examples from the community.

Adding Sound to Your Scenes

So what are you waiting for? Adding audio to your scenes couldn’t be simpler. Sketchfab free account holders can upload 1 sound per scene. Pro and Business account holders can up to 5 or 10 sounds respectively to their scenes.

Remember it’s important that you have usage rights for any audio you use and if you use music or effects under the Creative Commons license use your scene description to attribute appropriately. More on our terms of use.