Technical Updates¶

This section lists mostly technical updates such as file name or API changes that are mainly relevant for power-users or developers. General announcements are made via Patreon.

Upcoming changes that have not yet been implemented are marked using the Draft tag.

June 7, 2024
1 min read

AssetFetch endpoint for ambientCG Materials

Earlier this year I announced my intentions to build AssetFetch, a system for building easy asset discovery and import solutions without the redundancy normally associated with developing a new software plugin for every software / asset vendor combination. The specification and more info about this system is available on assetfetch.org.

In order to bring this system into the real world the first implementation of the provider-side of AssetFetch is now available using the following initialization endpoint: https://ambientcg.com/api/af/init.

This endpoint serves materials (currently only materials) from ambientCG via the AssetFetch protocol v0.3. Because the AF spec is still actively being worked on there is currently only one version available, future implementations (post 1.0) may endpoint versioning to improve stability.

A first client implementation for Blender is being developed in parallel on GitHub.

The availability of the "traditional" ambientCG API (v2) is not affected by this and any changes to it will be announced in advance on this blog.

August 29, 2023
1 min read

Minor changes to the filename structure of PBR materials

In this update, the name structure for individual PBR maps inside a .zip file will change slightly: The image type (JPG or PNG) will be integrated into the file's base name, like this:

Old name	New name
`PavingStones036_8K_Color.png`	`PavingStones036_8K-PNG_Color.png`

July 28, 2023
3 min read

New names for HDRI assets

Since 2021, more than 130 HDRIs have been added to ambientCG.com. Previously, these HDRIs were only grouped in two categories (Outdoor and Indoor) with a third category for the "sky-only" variants. With the growing collection this categorization slowly became meaningless which is why it was updated to also include the time of day.