As noted by Troy Kirwin of a16z on X and LinkedIn:

According to Kirwin, 'Games now require more assets than ever for expanding levels/worlds' and there is an explosion in number of assets from AI 3D generation. Also, content is moving from 2D to 3D.

Per Unity’s 2024 Gaming Report, 30–40% of developers spend 2 hours per week reformatting, resizing, searching, organizing, versioning, reviewing, and approving 3D assets.

Let’s see how echo3D, a 3D digital asset management platform (3D DAM) can serve as a repository for your 3D asset library and allow your team to perform all these tasks faster than ever.

3D models come in a myriad of formats, including OBJ, STL, FBX, GLB, GLTF, USD, USDA, USDC, USDZ, PLY, DAE, CAD, and more, making it a challenge to maintain uniformity and cross-platform compatibility. echo3D offers a 3D file converter that allows you to reformat your 3D assets and transform them to different file formats for any and all use cases. Allowing you to automatically convert your files to and from multiple formats ensures your 3D experience conforms to the requirements of your user’s device or headset.

High-quality 3D models often occupy a hefty chunk of storage, complicating storing, file sharing, and fast loading and streaming. Accordingly, 3D file sharing is much more complicated than sharing 2D files (pics, videos, etc.). echo3D boasts an extensive suite of 3D compression tools, aimed at effortlessly optimizing your 3D models. Reside and compress 3D files (and even videos and images!) without compromising how they look or losing any important details, to allow for low latency 3D data streaming. echo3D excels in performing these functions (10x over Draco!), allowing you to maintain both quality and performance.

When handling 3D content for different 3D, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), Metaverse, and spatial computing experiences and games, users require ways to search for, upload, and retrieve 3D assets and share them within their team. echo3D empowers you to enrich 3D models with metadata and tags, further expediting search and filtering processes. It allows teams to add metadata and tags to their assets, making content discoverability easier, using the echo3D search feature. Companies save time and money by reusing existing assets and avoiding unnecessary costs related to content creation.

Also, with the proliferation of AI-generated 3D Models, finding the right 3D content in a large library of assets is harder than ever. echo3D offers a free 3D model search engine for finding publicly available 3D assets. echo3D’s 3D asset library offers access to more than 800,000 free 3D models from major 3D model repositories, as well as models that were created by generative AI tools. This search will soon support filtering by model tags, file types, and more, making discovering and evaluating 3D models a breeze.

echo3D recently partnered with Alpha3D and well as Sloyd.AI to add even more AI-generated 3D models to the echo3D platform.

Organizations require digital asset management systems (or DAM for short) to store, manage, and edit all their content in one simple interface, organized into projects. A 3D DAM allows teams to manage their 3D asset library across their organization and deliver 3D content that can be updated in real time through the cloud from our central repository.

Utilizing the echo3D 3D DAM platform, users can maintain one central repository for their 3D assets. They can create a consistent folder structure and standardized naming conventions (just like in Google Drive), which simplify asset location and accessibility. Organizations can achieve substantial cost savings by repurposing existing assets and avoiding unnecessary expenditures on content recreation.

Keeping tabs on the different iterations of a 3D model, ensuring the latest version is always accessible, is no easy task, especially when collaborating with different members of a multi-talented team. echo3D offers efficient version control tools to manage your 3D content within your team and revert to previous versions if needed. You can even schedule future versions of your 3D content and update it in real time directly to the 3D experience. It’s really like GitHub for 3D.

Teamwork, sharing assets, and offering feedback can pose a challenge when dealing with 3D models, particularly in remote work settings. echo3D includes seamless collaboration tools, ensuring that all team members have access to, and can offer feedback on, the latest 3D files. These collaborative features include the ability to leave comments, annotations, and markups on assets, enabling effective communication among team members. With echo3D you can collaborate with your team through the cloud and easily share and comment on 3D models. You can also assign different roles and permissions to team members to view, upload, edit, and share 3D content, and to coordinate the 3D content release process.

Like with many other DAM tools, echo3D comes equipped with a built-in previewing feature, allowing you to visualize your 3D models without the need to open them in their native software (something called 3D preview or 3D viewer tools). This not only saves time but also aids in the early detection of potential issues or inconsistencies in the design process. echo3D goes even further and offers a tool to create custom webAR experiences that can be shared and viewed online.

echo3D also comes equipped with built-in analytics and reporting features, tracking metrics like asset usage and viewership, user activity, and bandwidth and storage use. By analyzing this data, you can identify user trends and preferences, flag opportunities for improvements, and allocate resources in a more efficient manner.

Access permissions and access controls are also crucial to allow teams to manage how users and viewers gain access to a 3D collection of assets. Setting different access levels to an asset can allow a user or viewer to edit, update, delete, or download the asset while setting collection-level permissions can grant granular control over edits to your team’s project. Using the echo3D 3D asset manager, teams can manage their 3D assets collaboratively, while tracking and approving changes and revisions. A simple approval process allows teams to streamline their workflow of creating, editing, and deploying 3D assets.

We believe that 3D digital asset management should be simple, and so we built echo3D — a 3D Digital Asset Management (3D DAM) platform that helps businesses maximize the value of their 3D content.

Sign up for a free echo3D account or schedule a demo with us today!