

Blend Swap V5 Launches



Blend Swap relaunched this night with a ton of improvements (great!) and broke all of their existing model links (ehm, not so great).

Matthew and Jonathan write:


We stripped the whole site down to nothing and have rebuilt it from the ground up on a new, faster platform. You will still recognize the site when you visit it, everything still looks familiar. But we’ve made it faster, more stable and with a ton of new functionalities and features that you’ve all been asking for.

The first real big feature is done all behind the scenes, it’s called the Re-Packer. You can now upload a zip file or a lone .blend and we will re-pack it for you in standard zip format and include a license file with it. All automatically.

We’ve also beefed up the search feature to allow you to search not only by keyword, but also by most downloads, license type, and the chance to filter out Fan Art blends.

The dashboard has been completely overhauled, it’s more like a social network feed, and includes filters to different types of events. From the dashboard you can view recent comments made on your blends and blends you’ve commented on; you can also see when the artists you follow upload new blends via the Dashboard.

There are also in-site, private messaging, so now you can contact any artist privately and not through the comments. We’ve also added the @username auto-linking to most parts of the site where you can enter info and you will get notified if someone mentions your @username in comments.

A cool brand new feature that everyone gets is called Collections. Collections allow you to store files basically in a “folder” for later use.

We’ve really tried to give our Associate Members ($10/mo) tons of new awesome features like Unlimited and Private Collections, For Hire Badge, Extended Profile, a Portfolio section and personal stats about all their blends. Plus no ads and the option to see upto 60 blends per page.

We still support for live 3D previews and added support for Sketchfab with just the model url. Blends now also feature Multiple Preview images, up to 5 per blend.

We’ve also improved a lot the download system, and now you have up to 24 hours to retry downloading a blend if it fails the first time.

Blend Requests have been reworked to be easier, WAY EASIER to use and answer.

A brand new Question and Answer section has been added to help you get questions answered from other blender users on the site about those Blender features you still need practice on.

Jonathan and I really poured over your requests, wants, and needs to try and give you as much as we could we really hope you all love the new site like we do.

As always thanks to the whole Blender Community, without all of you Blend Swap would not be what it is today.

Thank You!

Matthew / mofx
Jonathan / poifox

Blend Swap

About Author

Bart Veldhuizen



  1. This site was great but now it's total crap.
    I can't log in even though my mail is valid.
    when I request changing password, they say there isn't such e mail in the data base (but there should be, I still have my subscription notification email!)
    I tried even registering again but ALL usernames are taken! Just type anything an it still say's it's taken.
    I tried to contact the service but to do that I have to be LOGED IN..... total crap.
    How can I contact about the fact I can logi in if I have to log in to do that ? ...

  2. @masluch
    Try simply follow the ling for resetting the old password.

    Great new categorization and structure on the site, I really like it.

  3. Reset password, logged in, then "The request has been ASS HOLED"
    A small question to the site designers retards: Have you ever heard of "If it's not broken DON NOT FIX IT!"?

  4. I can't understand, and I'm concerned ethically.
    We contribute to Blendswap to make a "donation" to the world, our efforts to model something can save other people the hassle of doing the same, and more results can be obtained by the world.
    We don't get paid for the model we share, we do it to contribute to the "open" world.
    Now, I see a more than 2X increase in the restrictions... Only 200 Mb per month, instead than 100 Mb per week... and immediately the offer to PAY to get more bandwidth, in the first page... while you can download Blender itself (a huge value) for FREE.
    This thing make me feel sad.

    • Can't have everything for nothing. Servers aren't free. Time is spent maintaining the site. Developers have to eat. And no, we contribute to BlendSwap to keep the Blend files free and open--that's nothing to say about the service responsible for catering to supporting that idea such be completely free and open.

      The site's still free and open, so it's not abandoning that concept. Though, if they want to charge a little something for premium members in order to help offset server costs and time spent managing the site, they can (and probably should). BlendSwap is going larger in inventory, more frequented in visits, and more popular in growth. Sorry, but that takes time and money to upkeep and users increasingly eat up space on a server somewhere.

      That's the problem with the world of "free everything" support--people quickly lose sight of the fact that nothing is truly free. Nothing can be. Free things always takes up resources, even if just someone else's time, room and energy. Freedom always costs something.

      If you want such a free unrestricted service to share files without any size restrictions, try opening a free Blogger account and provide Dropbox or Google Drive links for freely sharing your models and let folks on BlenderNation know you're have it. In fact, other people can start doing the same thing and perhaps we could have a page here on BlenderNation dedicated just to collection of such asset blogs. That's what I'm doing (and the blog will be up soon).

      But still, the service coming to BlendSwap are well worth the simple $10 for Associate Members if you use the site that extensively. The small cost goes towards supporting the development and maintenance of the site, and the smaller 200 MB/month size is probably due to growing demand on the servers.

      You can try that, or you can try making a .blend file-swapping site yourself and you'll quickly find out exactly why these guys are doing this. ;)

      • Dane Vandewiele on

        What would be a great feature, to save on bandwidth, and keep things more open and free, would be to allow artists to place the file on a bit torrent seeded by the site. this way the more populer files would seed themselves, thus taking up no bandwidth :-)

        in this way they could also allow files of this nature to be downloaded more, say 700MB or 2gigs with a good solid seed record (IE if you keep seeding you get to download a lot, and if you leach you dont) just a random thought could be cool :-)

  5. sunseeker your right.
    I understand that they want to earn some money but this is to much. People do it for free so they don't want others to sell only the model (not part of other work). What would they think when I would take a cc0 model and sell it on some stock site?
    It was a great site, some revolutionary aproach, by sharing models for free, but these changes make thing go the wrong way.

  6. @sunseeker & masluch - A man's gotta eat :P
    But your arguments are strange anyways - there's no restriction to how many blends you can upload, and the more you upload the more you can download.

    The restrictions are simply to reduce the amount of people who only download blends and don't share any of their work. It's called Blend*Swap* for a reason :P
    The other side of it is the server bandwidth. If you remember, BlendSwap was always having problems with the amount of bandwidth they needed and how expensive it was. That's when they introduced Associate accounts so they they could afford to buy a better server so BlendSwap could actually stay alive. At the moment I doubt Matthew is close to breaking-even with the server costs and employing Jonathan.

    If you can't afford 33 cents a day then you shouldn't even have a computer. The more this community wines about prices that are "to much", the less seriously it's taken.

  7. Yeah everybody has it's reasons. Giving free premium acounts for those who upload a lot (for a period of time at least) wolud be fair. but fix the registring first. I can't register a new acount, every user name is taken. My old one doesn't work but it should (my email is still working and it wasn't a dummy registration).

  8. You need to enter your USERNAME, not email to reset the password.
    You'll get a confirmation email sent to your spam folder.
    Worked fine for me.

  9. Thanks clemens!
    I tried to log with only username but it did't work. but i didn't use the username only the email when the reset password box showed. I didn't spot that. thanks

  10. "only 200 Mb per month"
    I only got 100MB worth before it shut me out for a whole month. A week was frustrating, but at least a little more reasonable.

    "If you can’t afford 33 cents a day then you shouldn’t even have a computer."
    First we buy the computer, THEN we download the Blender, then we get the power.

  11. “If you can’t afford 33 cents a day then you shouldn’t even have a computer.”
    can I pay daily ? not monthly ? :)

  12. My pet peeves with the new blendswap.
    First, ALL OLD LINKS ARE BROKEN. This is a HUGE problem for anyone trying to credit blends that have been used, which you have to do with the Creative Commons licenses. Blendswap said, for crediting, that linking to the blend pages was appropriate. Now everyone who has used a blend on blendswap and credited it is crediting a broken link that leads nowhere. That's an unacceptable breakage for a site dedicated to the sharing and crediting of assets.

    The blend page: it's ugly. The last version looked good, information was obvious, etc. The new version is very cluttered, with important information (license, size) no move obvious than generally irrelevant things (blender version, date, md5 checksum).

    If users upload files for free use by everyone, as long as credit is given where credit is due, and the site breaks all old credits and limits free downloading to the extent it has, users are going to go elsewhere.

    Also I don't get the feeling that anyone on blendswap wanted social networking dashboard-like functions - private messages sure, but blendswap isn't a social network, it's an asset-sharing network.

    TL;DR, blendswap has been going downhill since the addition of paid accounts, and this may be the last straw for a lot of people.

  13. @Greg Zaal
    (with all respect and friendship)
    Why a great service, like Blender itself, is still alive without forcing to pay?
    Beacuse of:
    - passion
    - commitment
    - quality
    - donations. has a HUGE traffic, much higher than Blendswap. But it never asked anything. In the end, many of us made a donation, realizing that it deserves it.
    I contributed a couple of times to BlendSwap, and probably I will do it again. But asking money OTHERWISE you're limited, it's not fair - it becomes lucre, respectable but completely out of the scope that dominates the open community of Blender.
    Considering how many coders are left the Linux community because of ethical concern of Canonical making money from their efforts, we risk to make the same error here.
    If bandwidth is a problem, just propose to mirror their models on other hosts. You'll find institutions eager to do it, starting from universities, who won't charge it.
    All the best to all of you.

  14. Just like everything else, it's all about the money. This is horrible. If they think they can force us to pay for blend files, so we can learn, so we can eventually make better projects in open-source free software..... I think I'm done with blendswap. I would rather go to all the trouble to ask the user to upload it to something like dA. That's what we should be doing anyway. dA is free, whereas blendswap isn't. Not anymore.

    • TOP chardfwannabeartist on

      Can't seem to use blendswap anymore, log in or even newly register. when i register again every word in the dictionary is a username. And from what I have read from other posts here, I am getting to dislike blendswap anyway. I hope blender never follows the ideas of this new blendswap site, as that would be a disaster for all of us. But thank goodness Blender is open source. Blendswap obviously isn't.

    • blendswap is still free they're not trying to make you pay for blends they're just giving extra perks to the ones who are helping to keep the site going.

      if you upload blends to blendswap you can get up to 400 mb a month.

      facts are facts stuff costs money and you can't blame the person who is taking a hit every month to keep the site going for wanting to try to entice users to help out. you can still get all the same .blends as the paid users and to be honest i don't see that much has really changed since the previous version. they just made it easier to find.

      speaking of deviantART. i've been on dA for almost 9 years now and they're no more free than blendswap is now. deviantART has pay accounts that do the same thing and then some. selling prints on deviantART is ludicrous because the artist gets hardly anything from it. dA is covered with ads if you're a free user. they sell merchandise as well. deviantART has plenty of different incoming revenue streams and has long since gone from being a community into a business that in all likely hood is supporting itself.

      blendswap is likely making a dent in someone's wallet to keep going.

  15. While I agree that the new site is still rather buggy, I don't see what all the fuss is about for bandwidth limits. UPLOAD BLENDS. I have uploaded a number of blends and my bandwidth limit *is* approximately 100MB per WEEK. That's the secret: upload. They are "forcing" you to pay as the always have: by giving back to the community rather than just taking.

  16. So let me address some of these issues and hopefully do some educating on the subject. Where to start...

    First: Bandwidth
    We reduced your bandwidth to 200mb a month. Yes, For people that don’t share. Share one file and you jump to 300mb a month plus 10MB per blend file shared up to 10 blends for a total of 400 MB a month for frequent swappers. Purpose for doing this? To get more people to share, so is it so terrible to ask you to share some blends. Guess so. Our focus is the Blender artists that share and proudly upload to the site, we give as much to them as we can possibly give and if you’re not contributing to the site with blends well, we feel it’s very unfair to give those users as much as as we give to our Sharing Artists.

    Second:Broken Links
    Yep this is our bad, it's easy to see stuff in hindsight. We are working to fix/redirect all links right now.

    Third: Money
    We’re not forcing you to pay anything, But this is what you have to understand, the costs of running a site like Blend Swap are high, very high, none of us gets paid good enough for the amount of work we put into it. I WISH I could say I make a living on the site or that I even break even. I also think it's hugely presumptuous to state that donations either monetary or for bandwidth are willing and easy to get. We've tried that, it didn't work. So instead of letting the site die we decided to offer more features and unlimited downloads to cover our server costs. Maybe I should’ve just killed the site and let other people have a try at running this kind of service, they’d be pretty disappointed.

    Lasty: All you people so eager to flame, degrade and complain. What have you done for the community? Anything? Jonathan and I have spent 3 years on this site. Countless hours trying to make it better for the Artists that use it and the community, and in all honesty your comments are a slap in the face to us. So if you want to boycott the site, fine, do it. To everyone who appreciates what we have done THANK YOU. We’re so very lucky to have your support and appreciation. You are why we do what we do.

    ps. If you know me you know the tone of this reply is really harsh. But I think it needs to be stated, I mean come on people look at what you’re writing and think about it.

    • maybe people are to harsh ok.
      but it doesn't mean that some of them aren't right.
      Some people complain becouse they are haters or just an emotional 12 year olds. But some of the complain just becouse they

      care about this great initiative.
      I think that first of all people got angry becouse of the way that new limitations was introduced.
      Instead of explaining why and what exacly was changed (for worse), You write that there's new, biger and better blendswap

      and it's better to all of you. So eager to see the new changes I try to log into my account and bum it doesn't work. I try

      to re register and ... it doesn't work. Then I want to send an email to you for help and... I have to be loged in.
      And then I see that the main thing that will change are the limitations. So the first impresion cloudn't be good.
      It's just about being honest to users. Like I said I think blenderswap is a great initiative, but when you make such a

      service in some way It doesn't belong only to You. People who upload and those who download sometimes depend on such

      services in their every day work. When you contribute you are just getting attached to the whole idea.
      Maybe you sholud announce it differently in the first place. Something like "due to maintaining problems we are forced to

      change the terms of use. Hope you understand" period. That would be fair.
      The second thing is that never heard that you had any problems. As a very important part o the blender community you just

      could ask for help, not only users but maybe even the Blender Foundation. I think that it's worth to spend some money of

      the blender community to support such an initiative. If blendswap was threatened to be closed, maybe people would be

      disturbed (only if the knew about it).
      And last you said "What have you done for the community?" - I think it's a low blow. You should't use such arguments.
      Hope you get out of trouble and that blendswap not only will survive but will expand. Becouse changing of terms doesn't

      guarantee that, hope it will prevent from closing this site.

      p.s sorry for my english, it's not my first language.

    • I wouldn't worry about all the negative comments. This usually happens when a company changes one little thing or a number of features. People get angry and start flaming because it isn't what they are use to, but after a while they will get use to it. Look at Facebook. When they change how people's pages were being displayed, users were angry. Then after awhile, they stopped being angry.

      I guess you can put ads on the site to help generate revenue for the bandwidth costs, but seeing how things are going so far, people will complain about that too.

      Anyways, changing site formats is never easy and there are always going to be bugs to iron out. This happened at cgcookie when they also changed their layout. It took them awhile to make it fully functional.

        • The problem with ads is people tend to use ad blockers which does not generate revenue for those visiting.
          As well, you would have another slue of people complaining about the ads.

          They are giving of themselves, their time, and their own money, if you guys can't appreciate that, then just go somewhere else or pout in the corner.

    • I greatly appreciates what you guys have done here and what you've been doing for the past few years. I thank you for this development. I am patient towards your working out the minor kinks to this new development. And I'm sorry you've received such harsh criticism from complainers who have their priorities out of whack here. Thanks again!

  17. servers and running a website costs money. i've seen great community websites kill off simply because the person paying for it couldn't afford to keep paying and there weren't enough people around who were willing to help out. there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving people who help keep the site going extra perks especially if you can still benefit from it FOR FREE.

    as others have already said you can still get pretty much the 100mb a week you had previously just by uploading blends in order to get 400mb a month.

    why this isn't pointed out in the faq or on the front page i don't know but it's stated here

    • Whoa! Now it's even worse. Clicking the Upgrade Now to Associate button drops you onto a 404-Page Not Found.

      I think I'll sit tight and hold onto my money until the kinks are worked out.

    • Could you send the full error to support[@] and we will get to it as soon as we can.
      Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.

  18. I honestly don't know what all of the complaining is about. Some of you folks here would do well to learn how to recognize what's truly a problem in life, and what truly isn't. It'd make all of our lives easier.

    The more popular a site grows, the more it costs (in money, time, energy, room, etc.) to upkeep it. It's completely necessary to keep the site as you folks want it--free, open, and if you pay a small monthly charge, ad-free. You can still share as you please--you just have to do it with dealing with the reality that NOTHING free costs nothing. EVERYTHING takes something to keep it going. In this case, for a website, it takes money, developers' energy and time, and space on servers. The site even has a FAQ nicely explaining this, even though it's already rather obvious to conclude.

    The site's currently got a few technical issues, but it's a brand-new system! Give it time, folks--they'll resolve them soon enough. Though, with most of these complaints, I have yet to experience. I personally think the site looks refreshing, features much better features, and is laid out much better than before. If you're just that confused about the layout, just the Guided Tour, which worked fine for me.

    I had no problems with logging in--just reset your password (and use your username, not your email address) and check your Spam folder if the password reset link from BlendSwap doesn't show up in your email. I'm glad that you can private-message people, since I've needed to do that before but didn't want to clutter up the Comments. The Re-Packer feature is a wonderful addition. And personally, I only use BlendSwap occasionally, so I'm fine with 200 MB/month.

    And as to some of you philosophical types who want to make this some sort of "ethical" issue, you're paying for a service, not Blend files. You don't complain about the donations that go towards Blender development--don't complain about this. Having a premium service better ensures financial support for the site, whereas with sites that operate by donations rarely sees donations from most of its visitors. You may complain, but you take and give nothing back. What's given a free .blend file compared to maintaining a site where people can share .blend files? What's demanding new features for Blender compared to developing new features for Blender? Ponder that a while.

    If you just have to download something more beyond your free 200MB a month on BlendSwap, just simply e-mail the content creator for a Dropbox or Google Drive download link (easy to do if they have a blog site or they're listed on BlenderArtists), or just pay the small $10 a month (which you probably spend on coffee in a week).

    It's really not that big a deal, folks.

    • Forgot to mention where others have mentioned that if you upload .blend files to BlendSwap, you can get up to 400 mb a month. More than enough for most needs (and you'll be back to the 100 MB/week). Though, I think I may just sign up as an Associate Members soon, just for the For Hire Badge, Extended Profile, and Portfolio section alone. Networking is always worth the little you spend on it.

  19. @blendswap
    I did my best to say it kindly, politely, and in a personal way. You consider it "flaming".
    It was just my opinion, a personal thought shared here.
    I say it once again: all the respect for everybody who like these recent changes.
    I find horrible (again a personal opinion) to read sentences like "What have you done for the community? Anything?".
    I didn't do so much. But I'm not ashamed. I just did my best to promote Blender when in the company they wanted to buy commercial software, I recommended Blender to many friends and I helped them to learn the basics, I answered just a couple of (easy) questions on some forums, made small donations, submitted a couple of bugs, uploaded a small model on Blendswap that was interesting for only 70 persons. I spend 6 hours in the weekend to make a short movie with Blender, so that some people in the community will be happy for some 50 seconds to see it and say "I want to do something myself" (hoping they will be better artists than me).
    I'm happy that you did more than me.
    You will surely consider my final thought "wrong", but I'm proud of never asking anything to anybody, moneywise (maybe all my contributions are worth 1$ only). It's my hobby, my passion. I make money with my "real" job, Blender is smelling pure and FREE. I can bear the expenses of my passion.
    Forgive me if I think this way, I respect your point of view even if I don't share it.

    • "Free" is relative here. "Free" always costs something. Even Blender isn't truly free--it costs developers' precious time, energy, space on any servers, and sometimes even out-of-pocket expense. In reality, there is only sharing with others and the sharers always bear the expense of sharing. Nothing is truly "free."

      This new rendition of BlendSwap is doing nothing to hinder the nature of Blender, its cause, or even the nature of sharing Blend files with other users. If anything, it's taking necessary action to keep such efforts alive. It's people like you who seem to think that all this "free" philosophy costs nothing to upkeep, and you cry about every little mention of money coming into the picture. Maybe you can bear the expenses of your passion, but that argument is asinine. You're one person, supporting yourself, and simply taking from provided services, services that take much greater expenses to run a service that's harder to maintain than it was easy for you to use.

      Paying to be a BlendSwap Associate Member is completely optional, if you contribute enough to BlendSwap you can get back that 100 MB a week, and , and yet, you still act like it's such a crime or "ethical" issue just to make merely available a small charge service on BlendSwap. Never mind the optional service charge is there to PRESERVE the freedom you so complain about preserving. Never mind that even the small cost of that charge won't even be enough to pay their personal bills or to have them make a full-time living off the site. You still complain about keeping things "free." Yes, let's just have "free" everything with BlendSwap, with no cautious to the consequence of cause-and-effect like bills to pay to keep the site alive.

      Previously, you asked, "Why a great service, like Blender itself, is still alive without forcing to pay?" and said " has a HUGE traffic, much higher than Blendswap. But it never asked anything. In the end, many of us made a donation, realizing that it deserves it." But how easily you forget that on several occasions, Blender has asked for money. What in the heck do you think those pre-orders for Blender Foundation projects like Sintel and Tear of Steel were? Why in the heck do you think they have a Blender store? Heck, Blender itself was reborn as open-source thanks to a fundraiser effort. We even see Blender Foundation receive sponsorships at times.

      So what difference does if the funding for supporting Blender development and community upkeep comes through donations or through an optional premium service? Running an e-store is just as commercial as offering an optional premium service. And while many people do donate to Blender's development, the overwhelming majority simply do not. Offering a premium service with better benefits is a much better way to better ensure regular support for upkeeping the growing site, all while helping to offset the developers' hard work in providing such premium features for the site.

      But still you complain. You whine. You claim to be stating things kindly, but the very nature of your comments are attacking the developers for something that's not even a problem if you're a regular contributor to BlendSwap. Truth is, you don't have to get the premium service if you don't want to, you can get back the free 100 MB/month you're crying about, and if you just have to have more space than up to 400MB and since have a regular job, $10 an month (which you can cancel at any time) won't break your bank.

      Folks like you damage freedom. Damn the unfortunate cursed nature of a free society. Complaining, complacency, and misplaced priorities will overrun them.

      By the way, it should be noted that Blender is also intended to be useful for professional use. It's hobbyists with this whole purist ideal who contribute to it from being recognized as such. Such "I bear the expenses of my passion" purist and elitist babble is trite. As you already tried with your own job, Blender is free for ANY purpose, professional and commercial usage included. You already broke your own point about making money from Blender. That includes a website where people can freely exchange Blend files. Don't villainize BlendSwap for what they're doing--no, not even in a seemingly kind tone. If it weren't for their spending time, energy, and out-of-pocket expenses, you wouldn't even have BlendSwap. Cut them a little slack.

      • Just wanted to say thank you for keeping a cool head, and giving patient, well thought-out replies to so many of the people complaining and flaming here. You are truly a credit to the BlenderNation community.


      • Amen, +1, etc etc

        I'm probably being cynical, but I sometimes think those who sing the loudest about the Freedom of open-source are in reality doing nothing but trying to ensure an ongoing source of $0 resources - they certainly never seem to share much themselves. How about it sunseeker, masluch and Blender Head No. 1337? You're pretty good at laying out what you want but what have you contributed?

        In the mean time, thanks for your hard work at BlendSwap and all the best.

  20. Matthew, Jonathan:

    Thanks for setting up this central repository for us Blender users. BlendSwap has been a great place to go to browse the latest .blend files from users who are in different stages of Blenderability. It's been a great place to learn from others on how to do (or how not to do!) interesting things--like those nifty wireframe materials or the massive cycles material repository .blend file.

    Thanks for taking the time and effort into running the site. You have my continued support, along with countless others who, like me, follow up on all the Blender community development but don't always come out in the open to post our appreciation and comments.

  21. To all those who are flaming bswap (yes you), calm down :) Same thing happens every time some website changes something, people explode and say it's crap and pretend to boycott it. But a couple weeks or months later, everyone's happy with the changes and often admit that it's much better than it used to be. You don't have to believe me, but I was a beta tester and I didn't like it all that much at the start either. Now though, I can see how much nicer it is.
    Please try to give Matt and Jonathan a couple days to settle things before posting about how terrible the site is because of a few bugs.

    To all those who are smart enough to understand why things were changed, good on you :)

  22. I think few changes are good. I could live with few other (like less bandwidth).

    But... I have to upgrade my account to use advanced search filters and sorting. For real? Please, reconsider this. I have to use sometimes the CC-0 licensed models. There isn't always a way to credit the author, in such cases this license is the only option to go. And there is no advanced search for free account? I understand you want to earn money and wish you all the best, but maybe that change is a little to far. In previous BlendSwap site I could browse the CC0 collection. Now I can't.

      • Sometimes yes. Not always. It depends on the job. And sometimes it would be cost weeks before I get paid.

        Also, with previous BlendSwap version I tend to browse CC-0 models and if found something good I could use for future products I downloaded it. Now I have to buy premium account just to have the specific search button. No guarantee if I'll find anything usefull at all. It's clear that I'll rather search for an alternative sites like TurboSquid.

        I really like the idea behind the BlendSwap. I'm ready to pay for more bandwidth if I can find usefull models. But I can't find them without the proper search option ;-)

        advanced search for the associate accounts only = bad idea

        • @Mallow, this was an oversight on our part, didn't even realize we made searching for license type an associate account. License type sorting will be available for all free account with a more advance sorting type for associates. Again, that was our mistake.

  23. I am not sure if I visually like the new design/layout but the functionality looks much better.

    For all the complaints about download bandwith and money, you should consider that you have 100MB of free downloads per month.

    If you think this is a rip off and they are greedy, feel free to create you own counter Blendswap website.

    But as long as you only DL and complain about such minuscule things maybe it is time to shut up.

  24. I only used BlendSwap a couple times a long time ago. I stopped because I came back once and was required to log in. I thought "why? isn't this supposed to be free?" Honestly, I felt betrayed.

    I now realize my mistake... I didn't think about bandwidth and operating costs.

    Could I make a couple suggestions?
    1. When you require a user account, also display a big "WHY?" button. Have this dirrect users to a short explanation (pop-up?) of limited man power, bandwidth, money etc.

    2. When you make a change, especially when adding limitations, requirements, costs, etc., not only explain why, but place the explanation (or a link to it) in a place where it is impossible to miss. Make it obvious that "Hey user! There is a reason we do it this way! Read This!" And don't ever take this explanation down. Assume everyone is a first time visitor who knows nothing.

    3. I understand you tried running it one way and it didn't work. You had to change, and have a right to, but please also remember: going from free, unlimited, unrestricted download to any restriction can can feel like bait and switch.

    4. Lasly, ask the comunity for help. I'm sure if everyone understood what you are having trouble with, there would be lots of people happy to help get back to free, unlimited downloads.

    I share this because I love the idea of free blend swapping and hope BlendSwap can continue to be a valuable resource. Thank you for explaining your position. I will try to be more understanding in the future.

  25. I hate Blendswap.
    Just for download 1 or two models i have to register and do all that
    crap. That is really wasting time ...

    Hopefully somebody makes a new free Website with Blender Models.

    • Instead of just complaining, how about you make a new site, I'll look forward to what you have to offer. Till then kindly shut up.

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