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chatman
Would've been wonderful if one could download these models.
kvark
Strictly speaking, they are rendered on client side with WebGL, so all the data is already on your machine...
netcraft
I dont understand why they wouldn't let you download the files, unless its just they dont want to pay for the bandwidth.
bayesianhorse
What I have noticed on sites like these, but also blendswap, an actual repository for ".blend" files, is that many of the models marked as "free" are anything but.

Not only is fan-art problematically at best, there are also guns and copyrighted material from games. And if that wasn't enough, you still can't be sure with the rest of the models if the uploader had the right to upload.

arcatek
To be fair, there's the same issue on 'classic' artist platforms such as DeviantArt. You can't be sure that the artist hasn't just ripped off the picture he is displaying.

At some point you have to trust (and hit with DMCA when you notice copyright infringements).

bayesianhorse
Yes, even when paying for art this can and does happen. I think some time ago there was a case where someone put a photo from the phillipines on Twitter, an agency downloaded it, and sold it on to customers, several of which had to pay millions in restitution to the original - and probably somewhat happy - photographer.

The more I know about copyright law the less I feel like creating anything at all. Here in Germany I can barely publish any photo with a child anywhere in it, and it gets only moderately easier with adults. Everything requires consent forms.

angersock
Ha, awesome:

  - 41% of models are OBJ
  - 21% of models are BLEND
  - 14% of models are DAE
Let's hear it for simple, awesome text formats!
Tloewald
DAE is not simple. .blend is not text.
Jtsummers
I think GP was referring to .OBJ with its 41% share of the site's models.
angersock
And that, more than anything else, is why we should all use OBJ for static meshes whenever possible.

In a past life, I worked on .dae import/export code--COLLADA is almost a parody of everything you can do to overengineer (badly) a file format.

I don't understand why people fail to grasp that, for static meshes, we solved the problem decades ago; I say this having done the exact same thing many times reinventing a compact binary rep.

EDIT: As a colleague points out, yes, sometimes for assets OBJ is not optimal; I contend however that for interchange it's pretty good.

Tloewald
In practical terms, right now FBX rules and we can hope that DAE will replace it (right now most DAE support is via the FBX libraries, so let's not all hold our breath). OBJ is great for simple geometry and UVs, but kind of hopeless beyond that.
habosa
OBJ is simple enough that I wrote an OBJ import/export/view tool for an entry-level computer graphics course. That's pretty damn awesome, I can't think of too many other file formats that simple that are useful in so much industry software.
santaclaus
Text formats can be downright huge, however. I've worked with quite a few meshes that exceed 100s of megabytes when stored as obj, but compress down nicely in binary. What we really need is a simple binary obj file. It would be a no-brainer to develop a binary variant of obj. This would be marginally more difficult to parse, but drastically smaller. Either that or convince Autodesk, SideFX, The Foundry, Blender, and others to read in .gz'ed versions of obj files.
bryanlarsen
It appears that .zip is the standard for binary OBJ. That way associated textures and materials can easily be included in the zip.

http://clara.io will happily import and export obj inside of zip, along with a lot of other formats.

mrchlblng
so does sketchfab and it even works with 7z or rar archives
steren
Little big details: The polygon counter and its background are using a parallax effect and a border effect to fake a 3D effect.
jderick
Why not put prices and sell the models? It's not clear if you can reuse these or not.