TurboSquid introduces Kraken Pro

TurboSquid has introduced Kraken Pro, a turnkey version of its 3D asset manager designed to help content teams organize thousands of models via the cloud. With quick searches and a highly visual interface, Kraken aims to provide a way of sorting and working with libraries of assets easily, so production teams have a clear view of what they have and where to find it.

Kraken is available immediately. Pricing starts from $599 for up to 10,000 models and 50 users. Volume discounts are also available for bigger studios. TurboSquid is a leader in 3D content sharing. The company was established 20 years ago, and it serves a community of over four million artists and 70,000 modelers from industries including film and television, gaming, media, advertising, architecture, and others. TurboSquid is headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana.

“The same tech we use to organize 800,000 models in our stock 3D marketplace is now available to anyone working with 3D,” said Matt Wisdom, CEO of TurboSquid. “2D asset managers are prevalent, but they struggle with the needs of 3D. Kraken gives teams access to something specifically designed for the 3D workflow.”

To make the transition process more effective, Kraken Pro uses an AI sorting tool that can automatically organize and tag large model libraries for teams automatically. Users can simply provide access to their models via hard drive or the cloud, and the AI tool will generate categories, keywords, tags and preview renders during the importation process. The most common applications are currently supported such as Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya with support for Cinema 4D and additional formats coming soon.

StemCell works now with 12 file formats and applications

The new service builds on other TurboSquid advances from the last couple of years, such as StemCell 3D, The company’s model standardization product that allows artists to build a model in their preferred format, upload it to TurboSquid’s servers, and receive conversions to many other formats, including major game engines such as UE4 or Unity. Under the hood, StemCell consists of an engine to standardise models to a format with clean geometry, texture-based materials with standard specular and PBR workflows. “Their PBR-based approach to material conversions lines up very nicely with the modern texture workflows that we support and that we’ve seen adopted by tens of thousands of Substance Designer & Painter users,” comments Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. StemCell is currently compatible with 12 common file formats most recently adding Arnold and USDZ support. 3D standardization of huge libraries of PBR-based models for 3dMax and Maya artists, especially when artists need to be working between platforms is key to modern production pipelines. Increasingly animation and effects teams need to integrate with marketing, merchandising, promotional and/or real-time asset sharing requirements. But creating a reliable asset management system with intelligent metadata and search requires AI-based model processing.

StemCell supports Arnold & USDZ support into UE4 and Unity helping with AR and other re-uses of models

The Kraken database project was originally developed as a custom platform for big-box brands and other major retailers. After launch, various studios approached TurboSquid for a turnkey version to replace the stop-gap proprietary systems that were causing delays and annoying artists. These studios now find that they can access their assets easily, reducing the need to rebuild or waste time hunting through archives for lost models. Kraken makes distribution easy to a host of cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and more.

“We handed them terabytes of models and they came back to us magically tagged, organized and categorized, with metadata and clean thumbnails,” said Carlos Cristerna, Neoscape principal and RadLab director. “Our 3D artists don’t have time to worry about being librarians; they need to find content quickly. Kraken will help us do that.”

 

Kraken is backed by AWS protection, keeping content secure as it’s shared among internal and remote team members. When new assets are developed, they can be uploaded into the system and sorted through tagging. Kraken’s filtering tools become more nuanced as tags are assigned, helping users hone in on search parameters with a couple of clicks.