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.
Need Help Getting Started?
For full instructions on adding audio to your scenes, our Help Center has you covered. Please note that some features are not supported on all browsers, and/or devices. We’re working hard to bring improvements to our sound functionality in the coming weeks and welcome your feedback.
Really great to see both sound and Lily & Snout premier on Sketchfab! The project turned out like a dream and sound will add a whole new dimension to our 3D art.
Thanks for making this possible!
Wow! Outstanding! And congrats!! That is HUGE 😀 !
Right On SketchFab! More power to the whole team \ (•◡•) / !
What a great step forward! I love it!
The Lily and Snout short was wonderful 😀
I was so happy with this news, that just after reading the Title jumped to my Happy Dance animation to update it with audio!!! 😀
Wooaaa! Lily & Snout is the coolest thing!!!
Really nice with the sound *thumbs up*
Please, remember to ad a filter to search new stuff with sound!!, i want watch these amazing new art!. By the way, Lily & Snout seems good to watch in VR, and the sound are Surrounding, great work!.
It’s coming. Don’t worry!
This is insaaane, this is the best news ever 🙂
Super cool! Thank you for Audio. We added the real audio from the Apollo 11 Moon landing to our scene.
Apollo 11 VR Experience
https://sketchfab.com/models/2324f9685404433fa6231c7cb2cd2ff5
Wow, this is fantastic! And furthermore, I can hear you’ve implemented HRTF into the audio renderer, which is doubly fantastic!
Hurray, what an improvment !
Great teaching tool. Not sure if I really like being my own cameraman for a longer theatrical piece but for a short like “Lily and Snout” it is a fun effect. It actually makes you want to watch it more than once to make sure you get to see everything.
Very Nice work guys!!
I would like to say….maybe you can consider left the observer can move around the place into the movie, like the other animation scenes. For instance Lily & Snout, play into the jungle, you can go into the Snout´s cave to see what kind of things Snout have inside. or try to find a hidden tool or bottom that make the end´s movie change for another one or jump to next Lily & Snout move ? !.
Is just and Idea.
But, again, very good work!, wanted to see next movie!
Glad you like it Matthew! I’ll have to ask the sound team about HRTF…
Very cool – I’ve added the landing to our community sound showcase: https://sketchfab.com/Sketchfab/collections/community-sound-showcase
I loved the idea of using sounds in 3D models.
As a beginner in Blender I still do not know how to do this.
Would not it be nice if you taught the basics?
Congratulations on the work, every day that passes I appreciate more and more the skecthfab
Our friends over at BlenderNation are a great resource for Blender tutorials!
Yes! I see you implemented my concept idea to the sketchfab UI. Possibilities/potential is even better now for 3D artist.
Sounds great! pun? 🙂 But I get the impression the people viewing my work don’t want to hear sound. I put sound on a couple of them that I felt went with the work and I get a comment like this. “…. Gladly in photography don’t have to hear something. You can also hear with your eyes ;)”
Which is a response to the sounds on the 3d objects. Perhaps they are better suited for a movie, so a animated movie. When people browse the internet, they certainly don’t want unexpected “auto-play” sounds. It appears when moving my model the sound is automatic and I will be removing my sounds until something can be improved. But thank you for the feature.
I did get someone who thought the sounds were great. so I have gotten mixed reactions. Thought I should update my comment.