The Khronos 3D Commerce™ Working Group was established with the goal of spearheading industry alignment on the creation, management and display of 3D content for e-commerce—and since its formation, the use cases for 3D assets in e-commerce have rapidly expanded. For example, e-commerce sales have more than doubled in the first three quarters of 2020, and so the need for a consistent 3D content experience spanning desktop browsers, mobile devices, and AR/VR applications has become even more acute.

In response, the 3D Commerce Working Group has today released V1.0 of its Realtime Asset Creation Guidelines for use by 3D artists who are familiar with 3D workflows, but new to creating e-commerce 3D assets for cross-platform delivery. Developed by a diverse working group of over 70 industry-leading technology and retail companies, these best practices will enable artists to efficiently author 3D assets and models that can be reliably deployed for real-time rendering on diverse end-user delivery platforms.

The guidelines are 3D tool-agnostic and can be used alongside any asset creation software. They provide content creators with an easy-to-understand set of recommended practices and presets for publishing targets including desktop, mobile, and AR platforms. These recommendations will be actively maintained by the 3D Commerce Working Group so they stay up-to-date as 3D and XR technology evolves.

The Realtime Asset Creation Guidelines are published on GitHub and also available as a PDF. They are ready for use by artists and developers, and contain a comprehensive set of best practices, including:

• File formats and asset structure - file and data structure conventions for naming, asset placement, and pivot points
• Coordinate systems and scale - requirements and best practices for the most common runtime file formats
• Geometry - techniques for creating realistic, detailed assets for efficient deployment to web and mobile platforms
• UV coordinates - techniques for efficiently mapping textures onto 3D assets
• Materials and textures - best practices for optimizing materials rendering for real-time asset delivery and creating high-quality texture files for both source and real-time assets
• Lighting and Rendering - best practices for lighting in real-time 3D assets, as well as testing and confirming the accuracy of an asset prior to final export
• Publishing Targets - best practices relating to the size, resolution, triangle count, draw calls, and texture size and aspect ratio of source and real-time assets

If you are a content creator, tool developer, manufacturer, technology vendor, or retailer, we invite you to put these guidelines to the test and share your feedback and suggestions to make them even better! Your insights and pain points will help us evolve and simplify the 3D asset creation and deployment process for the benefit of everyone in the retail industry.

If you want to become directly involved in the ongoing work of the 3D Commerce Working Group, any company is welcome to join Khronos to have a voice and a vote in the evolution of any of its standardization activities. The 3D Commerce working group is currently developing additional guidelines including metadata recommendations using XMP schema and CLI tools; an asset configuration extension for glTF; a viewer certification program to promote visual consistency across the industry; and more. Contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to learn more about joining us in creating open, cooperative, cross-vendor standards and guidelines to streamline the creation and use of 3D content in retail and e-commerce!