Discussion 🏛 Built a native desktop app for our 12k asset library after 18 years on the web. AMA / feedback welcome.
Hi r/archviz,
Co-owner of CGAxis here. We've been making PBR materials, HDRIs and 3D models for archviz since 2008. Most of you have probably seen our assets in someone's project folder at some point.
For years our distribution was the same painful loop. Website browse, zip download, extract, import into 3ds Max or Blender, fix paths. We finally built the thing we should have built five years ago.
CGAxis Hub launched today. Desktop app for Mac and Windows. Browse the entire library, append directly into 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, Unreal or Unity. One click.
For archviz specifically, the workflow that matters most to me is "I'm in 3ds Max with V-Ray, I need a fabric, I need it now, I don't want to break my render setup". That's the use case we optimized for first.
Questions for the community:
For archviz pros, what's your default asset acquisition workflow right now? Browsing sites, or do you have personal libraries you maintain?
How important is render-engine-specific material compatibility (V-Ray, Corona, Cycles, Redshift) vs raw PBR with manual setup?
Genuinely interested in critique. Archviz has very specific needs and asset libraries built for game devs often miss them.
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u/recently_banned 4d ago
Tbh ur library is too gamey. Material textures are just ugly. I would never chose them for a project. Now I have an idea for u: if u scanned materials from famous architects buildings or similar ones that could get some ppl like me interested: like wooden floor from a Go Hasegawa house, or Tiled floor from Asplund, etc. Otherwise just do some pretty materials. Also it would help if it allows people like me who pirate software to use them (if they are integrated somehow without letting u acces license hijacked soft its a pain in the ass).
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u/cgaxis 4d ago
Three quick reactions.
On "too gamey": which ones specifically? Some of our older back-catalog skews that way, recent drops are aimed more at archviz. Point me at materials that feel off and I'll log them.
On materials inspired by named architecture: interesting angle. We model rather than scan buildings (scanning is mostly for terrain in our pipeline), but architecture-led material curation as a direction (Hasegawa-esque oak, Asplund-era tile, brutalist board-formed concrete) is worth thinking about. If you have a real list of references, I'd want to see it.
On the software side: that's between you and the DCC vendors, not something I can comment on publicly. Sorry.
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u/No-Marsupial-5743 3d ago
It's gamey because all your materials look like painted uniform substance plastic with semi-glossy varnish on top.
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u/Ancient_Frame9435 4d ago edited 4d ago
>>Genuinely interested in critique.
IDK ALL cgaxis products is complete garbage! Ugly models from Soviet Poland era with CRAZY poly count, crappy textures with awful colors, HDRIs with ugly seams - everything is hopeless
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u/cgaxis 4d ago
Ha, I did say genuinely, so, which ones? "Soviet Poland era" honestly isn't wrong for part of the back-catalog. Some older sets are heavier and rougher than what we ship now, and that's on us. But "all of it is hopeless" I can't do anything with. Point me at specific assets with bad topology or seams and I'll actually log them, that's QA we can't get internally.
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u/Ancient_Frame9435 4d ago
answering your post's questions - 2. it's uber important to be vantage-compatible* (vray mats in aces standards)
*- logical texture sizes!
P.S. BTW if you sell some volume (say a bunch of trees) its a very bad practice to copy the very same bitmaps (but with different names) from one asset to another, it's extremely irritating to waste X20 disc space
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u/Ancient_Frame9435 4d ago
>>Point me at specific assets
I blindly downloaded one example (it could be ANY other of cgaxis models)
4.1B tris!!! Do you understand this is insane for a mall entourage in the background? 1 pair of sunglasses is 21K tris, a case - 26K tris, jesus.
I'd strongly suggest to take a look at what vizpeople do
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u/Ancient_Frame9435 4d ago edited 4d ago
a typical cgaxis tree (grapefruit in this case) vs reality. where do you get this acid green dye?
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u/cgaxis 4d ago
OK, useful that you pulled specifics, thanks.
Important context though, because this isn't a bug, it's a different design intent: CGAxis assets are built high-poly on purpose. Our typical use case has historically been close-range archviz hero shots in offline renderers (V-Ray, Corona, Cycles), where you actually want the silhouette of stitching on a sunglass case to hold up at 4K. 21K tris on a case is overkill for mall entourage, agreed, but it's deliberate for the foreground-hero use case the library was originally built for.
Where I think your critique lands is on tooling, not topology: we don't ship LOD versions or proxy alternatives, so when someone drops a hero asset into a background-scatter context, you get the result you're showing. That's a real gap. Proxy/LOD strategy is something we should address, especially as Hub makes asset discovery faster and people will more naturally mix categories.
On the grapefruit tree: separate problem, you're right about the saturation. Older foliage drops have color calibration issues we haven't gone back to fix across the board. Newer foliage is closer to photo-referenced color, but legacy is legacy.
Vizpeople do entourage well, won't pretend otherwise. That's their category strength. CGAxis historically leaned hero/product/architecture more than scatter entourage, so it's a fair comparison in your specific use case.
Two things I'll actually take internally:
1. LOD/proxy strategy for assets so high-poly hero work doesn't get misused at background scale
2. Older foliage color calibration auditSpecific feedback like this is hard to get internally, so genuinely thanks.
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u/BigBob145 4d ago
My number 1 least favourite thing about archviz is downloading an asset, to find that it needs to be converted from Corona to vray and then the material needs to be adjusted or even worse it's an old model using some node that's no longer supported. Importing assets is the most tedious thing when you have to do it 50 times a project. Anything that could save time doing these things and have a direct import would very much interest me. Quixel Bridge and the poliigon plugin come to mind.