Fusing of Havens

 As we announced in our stream yesterday, Rob and I have decided to merge the 3 Haven websites together into one platform: Poly Haven.

Why?

Until now, all three Havens (HDRI Haven, Texture Haven, and 3D Model Haven) have functioned independently, which has made it difficult for Texture and Model Haven to grow, while HDRI Haven has reached a point where it receives more funds than we can effectively spend on just HDRIs alone.

This is a good problem to have, we’re super grateful to everyone who supports us, and it provides a wonderful opportunity to help the other Havens and therefore the industry as a whole more effectively.

According to the survey I ran a while ago, many people already believe that the 3 Havens are a single project, which is totally understandable given that the sites are all closely linked and I'm involved in all of them.

So what’s changing?

On the surface, not much. Our mission remains exactly the same: To provide free (CC0) high quality assets to the 3D industry with the help of your support, all while making our operations as transparent and open as possible based on your feedback.

Next year Feb/March is when we’ll launch the new combined site, after which the existing 3 sites will simply redirect to subsections on the new site.

Right now we publish at least 7 new HDRIs every single month consistently. Starting next year we’ll be reducing this to 4 HDRIs per month, and focusing on quality over quantity. We already have a very large selection available, so it makes sense for us to focus more on the specific types of HDRIs that you guys want, and to fill in any gaps in our library.

This opens up additional funding for creating more texture sets and 3D models. To accomplish this, we’re forming a new studio down here in South Africa and we’ll be hiring both local and international artists to create more assets for the new site (on top of what Rob, Sergej, Andreas and myself already create).

Being a more traditional company allows us to allocate income where it’s needed more easily, instead of being restricted to paying contributors per-asset as we do now. For example, if it’s something that you guys want, we can hire a developer to work on plugins for various 3D software in order to streamline your workflow.

Another good idea might be for us to work on training material, both for how to create the high quality assets that we publish, as well as how to use them properly. We may not have a giant library of assets like Megascans, but we can balance this out a bit by providing educational resources that explain how to use and adapt our small(er) library of assets to suit your needs just as well.

We will also be able work on assets in a way that’s more cohesive and efficient - for example by taking a trip to Namibia to shoot HDRIs and photoscan textures & environment assets all in one go. This will result in more “themed” collections of assets in our library that work well together, instead of just a collection of random independent doodads.

It’s still super important to us that you have a big say in how our funds are spent and what types of assets we should focus on. Just as we do now, we’ll have a Trello board and a weekly hangout where you can tell us what you want the most, which will guide us towards creating the best assets we can for your specific needs. If you want us to spend more resources on X-type of asset, this is how we’ll honor that.

Finally, this merge is not just going to help us, but it also brings some additional benefits to you guys: Starting from next year, all Patreon tiers will apply to all 3 types of assets. For example if you’re on the “Offline Access” tier, you’ll get access to all HDRIs, Textures, and 3D Models without having to support 3 separate Patreon accounts.

When we launch next year, the pricing of the Patreon tiers will probably go up slightly because of this, but all existing patrons can stick to their current level of support if they want to and still receive all the new benefits.

Ultimately I plan to register Poly Haven as a non-profit organization, though there are some bureaucratic hurdles that will take a few years to overcome. Until then, we’ll be treating the company as a non-profit anyway, with all our finance reports available publicly and all income used directly to create assets and benefit the industry.

Although this is big news for us and a lot will be changing under the hood, on the surface, to you guys, everything remains more or less the same.

We’re the same people working on the same thing with the same mission, and we’re glad to have you on board this journey with us :)

If you've got any questions or concerns, just leave a comment below.