The UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk research project was launched at the end of November 2025 by Thomas Flynn in partnership with Wikimedia UK, with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Its full title is UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk: Developing a Strategy for Long Term Access & Storage and it aims to provide direction for UK heritage organisations who rely on commercial and free-to-use platforms to showcase their 3D scans. Part of that direction will, hopefully, be some solid long-term alternatives to Sketchfab, which is really what we’re looking at here.
Sketchfab has been an incredible platform that I have used enthusiastically since it was launched in about 2012. I used to describe it as a “YouTube for 3D models” when working with museums and other archaeologists. Hosting 3D models for other people to see and interact with had until Sketchfab’s launch, been difficult and time consuming. Sometime around 2013 Sketchfab started giving free ‘pro’ accounts with generous upload limits to museums and non-profit heritage organisations. This led to the enthusiastic adoption of Sketchfab in those sectors. Big museums jumped on board, including the British Museum, and I helped five museums to get free accounts too, creating and uploading their content for them for many years. I’ve been very grateful to Sketchfab for the opportunities that they have provided, gratis.
Sketchfab even hired dedicated staff to liaise with museums and promote their content. Thomas Flynn was their Cultural Heritage Lead for many years and remained after Sketchfab was acquired by Epic Games in 2021. By 2023, Epic began a mothballing process with Sketchfab and made many redundancies. The marketplace element from Sketchfab was moved to Epic’s new Fab platform, and Sketchfab’s future remains uncertain.
Flynn left Epic towards the end of 2023 and there isn’t a better person to spearhead a new project to help steer cultural heritage organisations towards a more sustainable future for existing and new 3D heritage data. We desperately need that guidance.
The huge archives of UK (and global, let’s face it) 3D models on Sketchfab have made so many objects and monuments more accessible, and as such those collections are incredibly important. I have used Sketchfab countless times to look at rock art, for example, to help with some fieldwork or research of my own. Sometimes a photo of a rock art panel in a book isn’t clear enough or taken at the angle that I need, and if I’m lucky someone will have used photogrammetry to create a decent enough model that I can look at from any angle, or even download and use my own enhancement methods to better understand them for comparison work. The same goes for many many objects. All available in one place – Sketchfab. I’m sure a lot of organisations will have uploaded models that will have been used in similar ways by specialists or researchers, as well as for general interest.
The problem as it is now, is that Sketchfab’s offering was so good that our sector has come to rely on it. Rely on a service that they don’t pay for, operated by a company that has changed its business model. I’m sure that the higher profile Sketchfab museum accounts will still be attracting decent traffic, but bandwidth is expensive. I don’t know how commercially viable it is for Epic to continue running it for long.
And that needs addressing. Where else can cultural heritage organisations host their 3D content? How can smaller organisations who lack their own IT infrastructure continue to expand that content and be certain that it is worth the time and money to do so? What will happen to their ‘old’ content? Will Wikimedia, given their involvement, allow limited uploads of 3D files?
The UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk: Developing a Strategy for Long Term Access & Storage project will look hard at the needs of the sector and provide a lasting legacy, providing guidance for the way forward. I’ve already seen, via the mailing list, someone mention the in-development clone of what was Google Poly (Google’s now-defunct answer to Sketchfab) that could be self-hosted and provide a Sketchfab-like interface. I’m sure that this project will bring together the many people working in this area which could foster collaboration and present some viable long-term options. It could also make organisations aware of digital archives such as the Archaeology Data Service or guidance from Europeana.
I would welcome the guidance to re-introduce a vital aspect of 3D capture methods in the cultural heritage sectors. Preservation and presentation of 3D data is not just about public engagement, but about reproducible scholarship. 3D scans enable future re-analysis, morphometric study, re-measurement, and comparative work. Having a long-term archive ensures future specialists and academics can re-use data, especially as further analysis methods or technologies develop. Sometimes high resolution versions of scans are deleted due to storage constraints, especially when an on-screen web-ready 3D model with a photo-real texture that can be spun around looks so good.
Yet it is often that high resolution mesh – the representation of the object’s surface in great detail – that contains the information necessary for study and the potential to learn something new about it. Worn inscriptions on coins are a simple way to demonstrate this. A photo of a worn inscription shrink-wrapped to a 3D disc isn’t going to allow the inscription be recovered and read. A 10 million polygon 3D mesh subjected to filtering could.
As both a creator and a user of 3D cultural heritage data, I welcome clear, practical and up-to-date best practice guidance in this area, and wish the project team every success. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops, and what tools are developed along the way to make the use , presentation and archiving of 3D data in the UK and beyond more resilient in the future.
Follow the UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk project on their wiki.
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