#cgtrader

MISS NAMIKAWA!

I'm still working on my game... I'm just not spending much time uploading stuffs. Lots of advancements and hard work!

Here's a potential space station member... Miss Namikawa!

She's a modified model I bought of cgTrader.

Part Three: The Tea is hot!

Before we go any further, I have to tell you about this website called CGTrader. It’s a website where you can buy 3D graphics for your own use. This includes graphics for Blender. I’ve never heard of it until I started looking into this whole Hauzz thing

Now, this next one is what really got me. It’s just so blatant! 

It’s like they didn’t even try!

As I said before, there is a website called CGTrader and that’s where Hauzz decided to take their business from now on.

They really went from taking from tumblr to taking from CGTrader

They straight up copy/pasted that blender room!

But that’s not the worst of it! Oh no, it gets worse!

This was the part that pissed me off! You can see for yourself why this is a problem

Mind you, you can still find the room on CGT for $5.....

And Hauzz still has theirs for $25.....

I don’t know about you, but I could get a couple of blender rooms and some tacos with $20 #I’mJustSayin

Hauzz must not understand the concept of Royalty Free. Royalty Free means that you can use the content without getting copyright striked. However, it does not mean that you do whatever you want. Like put it behind a $25 paywall. 

That violates so many Terms and Conditions!

but given your history, I’m guessing you’re an individual that doesn’t like to read those right?

And a month later, back at it again with the thievery!

At the time of the screenshot, the room was on sale for $3.50. I think it’s safe to assume Hauzz purchased it for that much. (As of September ‘21, the room is available for $7) 

Hauzz does a half ass job of giving credit where credit is due. It’s like pulling teeth for them. The internet clocked them again and the best they could do give a little mention on their instagram. There’s no mention of the original creator on Patreon as far that’s as I can tell. 

If there was any mention of anybody, We would’ve seen it. Or at least seen the first few words.....

That’s all the receipts I have (for now) that include the serial thief that is Deborah Hauzz. 

Debbie, if you’re reading this listen, I’m not here to come for your neck. I’m just here to show the sims community your indiscretions. 

You don’t like it, then how about you stop taking credit for content that isn’t yours. Why don’t you start leaving links to the CC you use?

The shit ain’t hard to do!

The amount of times I have seen people mention about how a well known paywall creator has gotten models for their CC from one of the three sites above is amazing. So, I decided that it might be a good idea to reach out and ask the support teams of those sites how people using their 3D model meshes and then reselling them as sims CC affects their TOU. So here’s the basic question I sent all three sites in an email to their support department: 

Hello, so I have a question.

Is it allowed for people to take the 3D meshes you guys offer, modify them to work as modified content for a game (Ex: The Sims 4), and then sell that mesh as part of a patreon? There are multiple people in the Sims 4 Custom Content community who do this. Is this sort of usage allowed? They also are using 3D models from your site that have luxury brands like Chanel and Gucci.

Thank you.

So here are the responses I received, and they are interesting: 

Sketchfab’s response was the most direct, which I loved. 

CGtrader’s was a little bit more complex, but I’ll touch on that in a second...

And finally, Turbosquid. 

So let’s talk a bit about some of the things discussed in these emails and what they mean.  First let’s talk about the idea of extracting/retreiving the mesh/content, which IS actually a valid concern on the part of these sites. Because here’s the deal...it IS POSSIBLE in Sims 4 Studio to extract the mesh out of people’s custom content. I asked a good CC creating friend of mine @bill-l-s4cc​ about it, (he’s amazing, meshes his stuff by hand, and is early access...), and he confirmed this for me. 

So let’s say you got some CC from a paywall creator, and they bought a model of a luxury bag from CGtrader. They then made it work in the Sims 4, lowered the polycount a bit, and created a few recolors/retextures of that bag. You could STILL go into sims 4 studio, and grab the mesh that they bought from CGtrader, and potentially use it for whatever they want. That is what has sites like them all up in a knot. 

Now let’s talk about this whole “what is a larger derivative work”/a derivative work in general? For this, I’m going to use an example from the world of graphic design to help you (since I love graphic design myself). 

So I have a membership at Creative Fabrica, which offers tons of graphic design elements, fonts, SVGs, and other elements for anyone who does graphic design of any kind. They are very clear in their licensing about the fact that you cannot RESELL the products you get as-is. You have to REMIX them or create a larger work out of them. Here’s an image from their license that gives an example of this: 

Notice how in the first image, all the person did was literally copy and paste one of their graphic elements on a card without adding anything else or changing anything? In the second, they used that element and other elements to create something entirely new.  It’s the same concept. If you’re taking a mesh (Ex: a perfume bottle) and literally just changing the color and selling it on patreon as a sims 4 item, that is not enough remixing to constitute a larger derivative work. If you put multiple perfume bottles together on a shelf, perhaps that might count (although it’s murky at best), but again, with S4S as mentioned earlier, the meshes can be extracted. So...that legal problem doesn’t go away. 

So what do we do about this?  1) First and foremost, mesh your own stuff. If you are so inexperienced at meshing that you HAVE to use content from these sites to offer CC to people, then you need to get to work on practicing that craft, or somehow find a site that will let you redistribute the mesh on a game like the sims 4. even when people can rip it from your content. (Which considering that many 3D modeling sites have next to identical terms, is going to be next to impossible.) 

2) If you see a creator paywalling/charging for content that is from these sites, you’re free to send an email to Turbosquid, CG trader, etc letting them know that their content is being resold in that format.  I would also include a link to that person’s patreon. Since selling 3D models is literally the livelihood of the people who run those 3D model sites, and they’re not a massive multi-million dollar company that has the luxury of ignoring stuff like this, they’ll probably take some action. 

3) You may ask, are FREE creators/early access creators still in violation if they use these models. “Technically” yes. But they should not be as much of a concern to Turbosquid/other sites since they are not making bank off of it, and the money gained from early access can be seen more as a donation/contribution to the creator. (It’s still “bad” for these sites, but not as bad as redistributing the content with the pure intent of making a profit.) 

Again, see point #1. I would suggest that free/early access creators who are using this practice consider trying to mesh these objects themselves just to save themselves the legal/ethical trouble that comes with it. 

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I would also like to note that I feel for some people, using meshes from these sites is literally just another form of laziness. (Mainly when they claim the mesh is 100% theirs and it’s not instead of giving attribution of any kind or admitting they converted.) They could hand mesh stuff, but why do that when they can just grab a model and modify it?

But the problem with this bad habit is that it starts to get into the problem of copyright and terms of use. The whole “I bought it, so it’s mine” mentality doesn’t work there. (Also, I find it ironic that paywall creators treat their meshes this way, yet get so mad when pirates use that excuse to share the paywalled content with others). 

Humanoid Lion - Game Ready Character for Unity and Unreal Engine. Available in my 3D Asset Stores

Check it out @cgtrader

Technical details

Faces - 13978; Verts - 19634; Tris - 27618;

The Model has 13 animations:

idle (x4), run (x2), growl (x2), attack (x3), stun (x1), death (x1),

PBR Textures: Body - 4096x4096; Other - 2048x2048

-Normal -Diffuse -Metallic -Gloss/Rough -AO

Archive includes:

Maya mb. fbx. and obj.

SCIFI STATION - Low Poly 3D Art Construction Kit 

Available at: 

Unity Asset Store: https://u3d.as/148x 

Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/6wBns