For our dedicated Squid Guild members who use 3ds Max as their primary modeling tool for CheckMate certification, we’re pleased to announce the availability of an update to our CheckMate Tools (v2.114 – you can read the release notes here on the changes), and we encourage everyone, even non-Squid Guild members, to download them and take them for a spin.
Why are these tools important? First and foremost, I always find it vital to tell artists that you can always run them locally on your own 3ds Max files while you’re working so you can check to see that you haven’t missed anything critical to the technical CheckMate specification. Since the CheckMate standard has been developed in concert with leading professional 3D companies like Blur, EA, CNN, NeoScape, IKEA, RefugeVFX, Pluralsight, Armstrong-White and Weta, the tools can help you learn to build to the technical standard that can help get you a job in any professional 3d industry.
Also, remember that these are the identical tools our inspection group uses internally to test your models. If your models pass CheckMate on your own machine when you run the tools, you can be sure that it will pass the technical aspect of CheckMate when our team reviews it. That alone can save a lot of aggravation and effort.
More importantly, these tools now act as the foundation for our new CheckMate automation service. Yes, you read that correctly; TurboSquid has started using server automation to help speed up the CheckMate inspection process. Using these tools will allow you to get feedback on your work in less time through your artist CheckMate submission interface. This system (currently for 3ds Max only) runs continuously, meaning we can process more of your submissions, and as you’ve likely noticed, the turnaround time for getting results from your efforts should be decreasing. The inspection team currently gets reports generated from the automation system, informing them if anything has failed so that they can efficiently provide detailed feedback to an artist on what needs fixing. At present, we’re successfully processing a little over 80% of all 3ds Max files submitted for CheckMate, and only have to manually open about 20% of them. We are working rapidly to improve that statistic so that you can continue to focus on making really cool content.
Ultimately, our goal is to have automation processes for all CheckMate supported applications including Maya, CINEMA4D and Lightwave, and those efforts will be started once we finalize the 3ds Max pipeline.
Happy Modeling!
Sincerely,
-=Beau