Website Update: New Lighting Editor and more (Week 9/15)

We haven’t made any big releases for a few weeks as our developers were all caught up in larger projects. Luckily, this means we have some sweet new features to share this week: our brand-new lighting editor and folder embedding!

But before I begin, we also achieved something else amazing yesterday: Facebook is now supporting Sketchfab embeds! Try it out 🙂

Lighting Editor

You can now set up your own lighting. Using the new Lighting Editor, you can add up to three lights for your scene, pick each source’s type (directional, point, spot and hemi) and then set up their parameters. It’ll make a huge difference for your presentation!

Head over to the Lighting tab in the 3D Settings to give it a try. For in-depth information about this feature, visit our Help Center.

A note for Blender users: while we import lights from .blend files, these are now also limited to three.

Comment improvements

You can now @mention other members in a model comment and this will send them a notification. (Auto-complete is coming too).

Folder improvements

And here’s another cool new feature: you can now embed folders on your own website! Just browse to your folder and click the ‘Embed’ button to get the HTML code. The result will be a regular embed, but with two added ‘browse’ buttons on the sides that let you scroll to the previous or next model in your folder:

Games
by Sketchfab
on Sketchfab

While we were at it, we added folder descriptions. It was a popular request by many and we agreed that it makes your folders much more usable. To update a description, just browse to your folder and click the ‘Settings’ button.

Performance improvements

Annotations now display faster. This is especially relevant for Sketchfab Business accounts, who can use up to 50 annotations per model.
Loading large texture maps in the Materials Editor is now faster. And remember: you can upload several texture maps at once – this improvement makes that even better.

Other changes

We added an extra link to the newsfeed in the user menu (that’s the the one with your picture in the top-right).
We fixed the comment count in the news feed – it was sometimes off by one comment.
We renamed ‘Camera Effects’ to ‘Post Processing Filters”.
We increased the maximum length of model descriptions: from 256 to 1024 characters.

– Bart