 Hey It's nice to see everyone. I think this is my third time at the conference the first time was Five years ago. I don't know. So it's nice to see so many faces Actually, I'm not sure nice is exactly the right word. It's a bit intimidating, but anyway, so polyhaven is a Project I started I think around seven years ago And we're gonna go back in time a bit and I want to explain The history of how it became what it is today, but before we get to that Let me tell you what it is today So it is a platform where we create and publish high resolution HDRIs materials and 3d models And we give all of these away for free for everybody to do whatever they want with it So a few years ago I got an email from brecht and he asked if we could put some of our HDRIs in blender by default So of course I said yes So those are all my HDRIs that are in blender in the in the shading settings And if you look closely at the second HDRI there is a dog. This is my Labrador She she died a couple years ago But it's really cool to see that she is sort of immoralized in blender that everybody gets to see her that way So we're a small company. We're based in South Africa There's around 10 of us currently working about half full-time artists and half contractors working on various things currently we produce around an asset per day, but that's not exactly a target that we're trying to meet because we're focusing on quality HDRIs and textures and models and we're not trying to meet some kind of publishing schedule I think that's a easy mistake people try to make when they get started is to try and Meet some kind of deadline that they set themselves So when I say the things we make are free. I don't just mean Free that you can use them for specific things I mean free that you can use them for literally anything you want CC zero is the license we use it basically removes the copyright from whatever you're publishing and allows anybody to do anything that they want So if you're a hobbyist making a render, you don't have to worry about how you have to give us credit if you're a Film person or somebody working on a game You don't have to worry about getting the legal team involved to decide how you're allowed to use these and if you can publish them Or if you're a researcher making a machine learning algorithm You know that you have a large data set that you can use freely and you don't have to worry about licensing issues down the road So of course there are downsides to us making everything so free some people will abuse this Freedom in a way that benefits themselves, but in the end of the day We don't really mind that we think that the benefit that we have that we give to the industry as a whole is gonna outweigh that So it's okay This is the question everybody asked me is why the heck you're doing this why you give everything for a way for free So I guess this is my story around seven years ago I was a lighting and shading artist in a studio and I started to get interested in making HDRIs And back then all the HDRIs that were available were either low resolution or they were Clipped so clipping is where you don't actually capture the HDRI correctly and the lighting it produces is not realistic They were paid HDRIs that were a little higher quality But the stuff that was actually good cost you several hundred dollars per image So I couldn't really use it and I wanted to create my own now from the beginning I Always I wanted to give everything that I made away for free I was always interested in blender and inspired by that whole philosophy But I was afraid That I couldn't make that work. I didn't know how I could Give everything away free and still make a living and survive And I didn't know what the future of my career was where I was going So I was scared so instead I decided to create a website where I sold HDRIs in the beginning I sold HDRIs in bundles using gumroad for around five dollars each or in a bundle for cheaper But I also gave away the full the low-resolution version of the HDRI for free directly on the website so the website is an Interesting part of the journey because at the time I Couldn't find any WordPress templates I could use and I obviously didn't have the money to hire somebody to develop something more Customs so I ended up figuring it out and I guess that's the theme of my life as I have to figure everything out myself which is fun and then I built this website that I ran for about a year and Towards the end of that year. I started experimenting with giving away the full resolution HDRIs for free just to see what would happen and I still didn't know how to Host these giant files if you know HDRIs the full resolution. They're quite big. I don't know how to host them free So I put them on gumroad And gumroad forces anybody to Put an email address before you can actually download a file and I didn't really like this I don't like Buying something with my personal information, but I didn't really have much choice So I was okay with it and in the end that little detail of getting people's email addresses turned out to be quite important for our early success so After about a year of running this website, I Decided I still wanted to give away everything for free and now that I've been doing it for a little while I started to try and figure out. Maybe I could actually do it. Maybe I could afford it But what would that actually cost? So I worked out that it might cost me $750 a month to run the website and Give me a little bit of budget to travel to shoot more HDRI So this was the target of what I wanted to earn through donations in order to continue to survive then I Tried to work out. What is the chance that somebody will just give you money for no reason and It's I thought I had no idea. So I just okay. Maybe half a percent. I think there's a lot of resources out there with sales It's maybe one to two to five percent depending on what you're doing But for donations, maybe much less So if everybody was giving me five dollars and per month and it was half a percent of the people who could see the website Who would do that that would mean I'd need an audience of about 30,000 people So I thought that's achievable. So what I started doing is instead of focusing on Growing my profit like every business does I started focusing on growing my audience and This was really easy All you have to do is give things away for free and people love you and it works So pretty much immediately I Saw that this was gonna work out and I started strata but stratified strategize How I could incentivize people to support me The first way is using reward tiers where people get something in return for their donations This is a bit of a slippery slope It starts to look a lot like a subscription service and that's not really what I wanted to do I wanted this to be more like a reward for helping me So what you can try to do is make sure that your rewards are not that significant. It's more of a Superficial value like credit of your name on the website or next to your favorite assets and maybe a link to your portfolio And the other thing is things that are convenience where our assets are free But if you support us we make it a little bit more convenient for you to be able to use it So recently we created a plug-in that puts all of our assets inside of the new asset browser, which works amazing The other thing you can do is funding goals, which is sort of like a Continuously evolving Kickstarter where if I reach if people support us with a certain amount of donations per month Then we can start to afford this maybe hiring another person for creating more textures So after a couple months, we met the goal of the 30,000 people in our audience and I decided to make the switch from selling HDRIs to giving them away for free and To my surprise it actually worked really well people actually liked what we were doing enough that they wanted to help us and nobody People were always very shocked that I wanted to give things away for free and I thought that would work, but it turns out it actually works pretty well and We blew through the first few funding goals and soon enough I was actually starting to have to promise because of the funding goals to make more HDRIs than I actually had time for and That meant well, I had to use those funds to hire people so the strategy for hiring people was to find people around the world so that we could get a good variety of environments of different textures and that the weather would be more Various in South Africa our winters are very boring. They're lovely. They're warm It's it doesn't even feel like winter sometimes, but it's just sunny every day and it gets boring so while this was happening I started working with Rob and We decided to work on a similar site called texture Haven Where we made just like the HDRIs we made textures or Rob made textures and released them for free and so supported by a patreon model and This was always a completely separate project I happened to be involved in making the website and look kind of similar But it was a separate thing with its own funding and we weren't really trying to collaborate on any big projects But it worked pretty well and it was fairly successful But as you can imagine The first thing that people do when they see HDRIs textures. They think why don't you do the same for 3d models? You know, it's like the obvious next step. Why haven't you done it already? But I think I always knew that 3d models were a lot more work to make good They took more time. We wouldn't have as much and I wasn't sure it would work But eventually I applied for a grant from Epic Games and when we eventually got that grant I decided we should give it a try so we made 3d model Haven and Using the funding from the grant we could get started with a few dozen models on the site but This was in early 2020 so When the pandemic hit my partner who was working on the content for the site again It was a separate thing where I was just doing the website and my partner was doing the models his priorities changed and It kind of became stale. We didn't have the budget from the support from the patreon to Continue to create models. We just had enough from the grant to get it started Now around this time our only income was from patreon people donating to us and it was really good I was really happy with it. It was comfortable. It was growing steadily But I'm not really the kind of person to just leave all enough alone. Hey Does anybody here have a Website where you have your email publicly listed on the site you probably get emails like this People promising if you just put a few little like giant video ads on your site, then you will get lots of money So every now and then some emails like this would slip through the cracks And I would never do something like this, but it got me inspired Maybe I should look into it. Maybe it's something we could do Now I hate ads I have an ad blocker probably like most of you on all of my devices my computer my TV my phone I haven't seen an ad in like two years So if I was gonna put ads on my website that I'd spend years of my life working on they would have to be some boundaries in place so They had to be tasteful. It had to be worth doing and The people who were paying my bills would have to approve of the idea the supporters on patreon So that was where I started I made a poll on patreon to ask if Everybody was okay with that idea and we would do it as a three month trial where we would put ads on the website for three months and Evaluate after that if it was okay, and it turns out most people are okay with ads as long as they are unobtrusive and As long as there is a way for our supporters to turn them off if they wanted to so we went ahead with that and What happened was we started earning almost as much from the ad revenue as we did from the patreon donations And that meant we had doubled the income of the overall company overnight, but already We had too much money for just HDRIs. There's only so many skies that you can shoot So what made sense was to combine the three sides together to share that income to create more textures and 3d models and Not so much HDRIs So that's what we did. I believe in late 2020 or early 2021 We hired two 3d artists to create 3d models for the new site where we merged it together and Then we did that So it's not exactly the smoothest journey, but that is how polyhaven got started Obviously That is not the end of the story. That is the beginning of the story. That's how we got started The challenge was no longer how to make it work Because it was working the challenge was how to make it grow Now there's not a lot of organizations like polyhaven people giving things away for free. It's weird, but if you think about it There is an organization like us and that's the blender foundation So a lot of what we do is inspired by the business model from the blender foundation's relationship with the studio and the Institute and this kind of hybrid non-profit for profit Design, I guess So one of the things we started doing early on with polyhaven was working with corporate sponsors to see if we could get Companies to support our work now just like with blender the industry benefits from blender being open source there's a lot of companies who Can do a lot of interesting things to make them money because of blender and I think for us It's a similar thing where we create assets that are good and useful in a lot of different ways And some companies can benefit. So that's what we started to look at one of those applications is AI and machine learning where Because of our data set is so big and useful You can use it to train a machine learning model to do all sorts of interesting things and obviously there's film and visual effects in triple a studios for games and Getting them to support us is one of my current goals and totally not the reason why I'm here so I think what we're trying to do is difficult Anybody can make free assets and put them on the internet. That's easy. You can open blender Export the default cube and put it on the internet. That's an asset But then It has to be free to use For everybody for any purpose not just non commercially not with attribution. I have nothing against that But what we're trying to do is absolute freedom Including freedom to share if you want to create a scene and then share that scene with others You should be able to do that and Then obviously we want them to be actually good because nobody wants to use a default cube So along with creating free assets, we're trying to share our knowledge of how we create the assets so a few years ago I made an Article about how I make HDRIs. It's very long and very technical But I wanted to share how I did it because in the beginning nobody really knew what they were doing and I had to figure out most of it myself Recently Rico made a similar article about our texture scanning process and that is also really interesting to see technically how we take 400 photos and then turn that into a material you can use and blender seamlessly and Next year we're also going to be working on some training material for 3d models. That's not super well covered on YouTube already I know the blender tutorial space is huge. So we're not trying to Do what everybody else is doing you want to maybe cover things that are more difficult and more specific? the other thing we started doing is community projects where we work with our community of you everybody to create a Scene at the moment and then we get a few sponsors to sponsor prizes to encourage participation various plugins and tools and assets and This was of course inspired by the Sintel modeling sprint so Sintel is What does that say 2010? 12 years old and At the time I wasn't really good enough to participate in this we're making the Sintel open movie I'm sure you've heard of it. They asked the community to assist with making props for the movie and I thought that was a really cool idea and that's stuck with me And that's what I want to try and do because it's fun to work with the community So working with the community and people publishing assets on polyhaven means free assets for everyone and Free assets for everyone if you make something and share it on polyhaven that gives you some exposure But even if it's not good enough to publish on polyhaven, then we give you critique and feedback on what you can do to improve but if it is accepted then More assets on polyhaven means bigger asset library a bigger asset library means more attention to polyhaven More attention to polyhaven means more funding and more funding means more assets for everyone It's this kind of positive feedback loop that results in free cc0 assets for everybody to use So at the same time we started sharing how we actually build the website if you remember one of the Stumbling blocks in the beginning for me was figuring out how to actually Publish these giant files for free on my website and that's kind of why I started selling them instead of giving them away free Because I didn't know how to do this so I started sharing How we handle a lot of data how much it costs what our expenses are and all the source code for the website as well So what does this mean like what is this for it's been seven years? And we've been sharing our assets our knowledge and our code and our business model and at the end of the day what I'm trying to do is Inspire people to do the same thing to give what they create a way for free for everybody But doing that in a way that is Sustainable long-term is very difficult So I have five Pro tips on how to actually make that work and first is to treat it like a business Even if you don't want to you have to think about money because you need money to live It's you're not doing this for the money That's not the motivation, but you know that you need money to keep going especially to keep going long term So that means you have to think about goals and conversion rates and all sorts of business say things like that and then optimizing your infrastructure to be cost-effective so one of the things about having a donation driven business is that it's very expensive and That means you have to be very careful about where you use your money and try and find unique solutions That also means you need to be very transparent about your money because this is not really your money anymore You need to make sure that every expense that you have is communicated and people can trust that you're using their donations effectively The second tip is to stay human and don't treat it too much like a business There has to be a kind of a balance You don't want to come across as some kind of corporate entity because nobody wants to donate money to adobe They don't need money They're donating money to you personally so you have to make sure that you stay a person and you don't become a robot or an AI and communicate all the decisions that you make and make sure that Probably preferably communicate them before you make the decision so that you can get feedback from your supporters and see what they say And in the end treat it like it's still their money Not like yours if you get and a bunch of money. Don't go buy Ferrari. That's not why they're giving you their money third is that This certainly works at scale and this is a bit of a sad one You can't create you can't make a long term sustainable business from something that is too specific and too niche You'd think okay So the conversion rate for normal online sales Maybe one to three percent like I said earlier and in the beginning I thought okay Maybe a half a percent a lot less than that at the end of the day It's a lot less than that. It's two hundredth of a percent of the visitors to our website will support us on patreon And the reason that that works is just because of the scale of what we're doing It's very applicable to a lot of people and if it wasn't that it was more specific and niche than it wouldn't work So it has to be appealing to a lot of audience and finally Some just general good advice is to specialize and focus on what you're good at Don't try to be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Just do one thing really really well build a reputation for that one thing and Then later you can always think about expanding you don't have to jump right in the deep end and do a bajillion things and Finally don't stay comfortable. I Think maybe this is just who I am some people It's okay to be comfortable and to get used to something and cruise on the rest of your life But for me, I like to get used to failing to trying new things all the time and a lot of those things are not gonna work But that's okay. That's fine as long as you communicate what you're trying and When you fail why you failed and learn from it. That's a good thing Because you might just actually succeed Which is fun when that happens, especially when you fail ten times in a row So, yeah, that's pretty much how poly heaven works We've shared everything we have all of our assets and our knowledge and our code and our business model So I hope that inspires some of you here to try something similar or to join us on creating open assets for everyone Thanks