A Marketplace for Buildings

[tedbarnett]

Long-Term brainstorming here. Comments appreciated.

If we eventually want to recreate all of history in 3D form, millions of 3D building models will need to be created. It takes research and an artist's time to make a good 3D building (with interior, lighting, inhabitants, etc.) . That needs to be paid for. Hoping this will be sponsored by, for example, local historical societies, philanthropists, or enthusiastic hobbyists.

• To enable this, we need to make it easy to pay an artist up to $200 to make a historic building/place: my own house, my childhood home, my college dorm, Bryant Park, Washington Square, etc.
• The artist/developer could then make that building as a "TimeWalk-ready" module (pushed to a Github fork?) that can easily be plugged into our open-source library of buildings, landscapes, parks, etc. Maybe just a pull request system for the next 24 months.
• Is it possible to import (and export) a file (a .when or .twk or whatever) that can be easily imported into any relevant project (e.g. Manhattan, London, Berlin, Paris, San Francisco)? Can Unreal Blueprints work this way? Can I now save the Fort Amsterdam model we have and import it into another TimeWalk project?
• If not, how can we enable this?

[tedbarnett]

The files could then be wrapped with a hosted shopping service like Shopify or others.

Or make the building-objects into NFTs.

[JustPineStudio]

we would say that we would need a source of information database to make it easy for the artist to reasearch and have a clear standards for certain periods to have control of quality.

.fbx and .usd or UE file format would work the best for Import/export.

in order to make the buildings NFTs we would need to greatly decrease the file size and have a system of smart contracts developed to make use of the data. Maybe the buildings meta data would be a better usecase, where you could for example "buy" a plot of land with certain parametars in that time period and "build" on top of it . We are currently working on a NFT project for a client, so we could look into it a little deeper in its usecases if needed.