The Philosophy of Orynt3D

Piete bought his first resin printer in March 2020, and by September 2020 had no idea what models he even owned anymore.

Orynt3D was born from this notion to enable people (also Piete) to go shopping in their own files, before they go spend more money on models. A lot of the original design was informed by this Patreon 3D model boom of early to mid-2020, so focused on wargaming and roleplaying miniatures and terrain.

While we hope it's generally useful to people who 3D print things, be aware that most of the features have been driven by large model libraries made of wargaming and roleplaying figures, terrain, vehicles, accessories, etc.

The driving themes behind the development of Orynt3D are:

1. Libraries are big, and only going to get bigger
2. Models are not the same as files
3. "Organising" is not the end goal

Libraries are big, and only getting bigger

3D resin printing at home exploded between 2020 and 2022, and it only takes a few Patreon subscriptions and a couple of Kickstarters to have too many files to organise files by hand. If you started in 2020 or earlier, and haven't organised anything, the up-front cost of tidying up is extremely high!

We've chosen to focus on working within the libraries we already have, which means paying attention to folders and how we can intelligently help you get models tagged up and sorted for viewing.

While artists and customers are still experimenting with folder layouts, we also know that we need to be flexible with the import process. It should be hard to lose any effort put in, but cheap to experiment with new organising ideas like tags and folder layouts.

Models are not the same as files

If a model was a single file, all the metadata (tags, preview images, parts, etc) can be safely colocated with the file, just like ID3 tags are with MP3s.

However, looking at how files were shipped from multiple sources we found that the definition of a model is very variable. A model can be a single mesh, or it can be made of multiple meshes, split over multiple files, folders and everything in between.

While there are container formats for 3D models (3MF is one) which would allow this, they're not currently well supported.

We wanted to be able to talk about "models", not files, and so our smallest atomic unit is the model. Instead of hiding the metadata in a database somewhere and having it link to files, we chose to write the data in an unencrypted way into the folder, thus creating a container from the folder, and ensuring the metadata is hard to lose if the disk layout changes, or the library is migrated to other systems and servers.

"Organising" is the not the end goal

As with any good tool, the goal of Orynt3D is to move you from idea to action as fast as we can. In this case, that means thinking about what you want to print, or exploring, or being inspired, and then being able to take action: add it to a print queue collection, get it on the printer, enjoy the model.

The process of collecting and organising isn't the goal, the outcome of playing with your models is.