A new 3D model marketplace attempts to solve some persistent problems.
There are plenty of 3D model repositories around today, but honestly, most of them are a pain to use. You require signups, are subjected to all kinds of advertising, you aren’t sure whether that model you found is legal, and more.
One of the most difficult problems is searching for models. Today’s sites use simple keyword matching: do your search terms appear in the model’s name, tags or description?
Years ago when there weren’t that many 3D models it was less of an issue. Today it’s ridiculous. I used to do the “vase test” on popular sites: how many results would come back. The numbers were huge, tens of thousands. Now if you do the Vase test on, say, Thingiverse, you max out at 500 pages of results: there are more than 10,000 items, and it’s impossible to find anything.
Enter Minarium, which has produced what they bill as the “World’s First 3D Model Marketplace with Natural Language Search”. They are using some AI techniques to transform your search terms into results that actually mean something.
It works because LLM technology is able to cluster concepts together. Words that are different but mean the same thing are considered “close”, and that’s how it works.
Minarium’s marketplace is focused on miniature figurines, an increasingly popular genre of 3D models. These are present on current 3D model sites, but often challenging to find.
Minarium CEO Robert Walczak explains:
“As a creator, I was tired of wasting time describing my models instead of designing them, so I built Minarium to fix it. I knew that if I could identify a simple way to help people find what they were looking for based on the ‘aboutness’ of their search instead of the specific contents of their query, I could change the game in the 3D printable miniatures market. Today with Minarium, if you search for brutal battle ogre, you will find exactly what you’re looking for instead of only items that matched the precise words of your search.”
In other words, you no longer have to depend on matching the tags that the designer chose to apply to their model to find it. Minarium calls this “search like you think”.
But opening a marketplace with a better search isn’t going to win in this competitive area. Minarium has added a few more features to entice designers to put their content on the platform.
One is a digital fingerprinting system that might help slow model piracy. It should be possible to know the original owner of a model that appears on the site. That may help slow the problem, but only on their own site. A model taken to another site would still be subject to whatever piracy processes exist on those alternative platforms.
Interestingly, Minarium also has a blockchain setup that is a “supplement to traditional credit card purchasing”. I take this to mean that they will accept certain cryptocurrencies as payment.
The site looks quite clean, and the search is indeed very fast. It appears to have plenty of 3D models, although it’s impossible to know how many are present. This is one area where they may be challenged, as other sites have large head starts and have amassed huge collections, sometimes in the millions.
Another challenge will be service. Competitor MyMiniFactory has grown significantly by providing concierge-like service to designers, who often are less familiar with business processes and approaches. It does not appear that Minarium is offering something like that for their designers, at least not yet.
Nevertheless, Minarium seems to be a step in the right direction: 3D model search is irrevocably broken, and someone needs to fix it.
Via Minarium
