Yahaha Studios has announced the launch of YAHAHA Asset Ovi, a first-of-its-kind platform to help game developers to search for game assets quickly. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Asset Ovi is the go-to platform to search for assets for any level of creators, from students and hobbyists to indie developers and 3D creation experts. Asset Ovi cuts out the middle-man, allowing users to access search for assets across several of the most prominent 3D asset marketplaces through one platform, including the Unity Store, Sketchfab and CGTrader. YAHAHA Asset Ovi is now live, in partnership with Jina AI.

Finding the perfect assets for game creation is not easy for developers. Yahaha Studios conducted research to better understand the challenges associated with the asset search experience. The results showed that 80% of developers spend 10 minutes or more searching for a new game asset across multiple storefronts – making it a time-consuming, as well as difficult and stressful task to find the hundreds of assets required for a new game. With Asset Ovi, creators can browse over a million assets, using search functionality based not only on text but also by model, ensuring they find the specific asset required.

By launching YAHAHA Asset Ovi, Yahaha Studios hopes to help developers create more efficiently. Introducing this new tool to its free-to-use platform, YAHAHA is supporting game developers and creator enthusiasts at all levels to have easy access to millions of assets for free, making the game creation process as easy as possible.

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Chris Zhu, CEO at Yahaha Studios, said: “Yahaha Studios is constantly investigating new technologies to support creators – we are passionate about making it easy to make great content and bring imagination to life. When our research showed that some developers were spending hours searching different stores for assets, we wanted to help them. YAHAHA Asset Ovi is a free platform that anyone can use and it is integrated with other storefronts, such as the Unity Asset Store, saving game developers considerable time and frustration searching for the right assets.”

In order to make Asset Ovi as creator-friendly as possible, the platform has announced the YAHAHA 3D viewer. By using this method, assets can be viewed and closely examined prior to making a purchase decision. This tool allows users to examine the fine details of each asset, including wireframe, post-processing and material channels. Asset Ovi uses AI to power its search. Partnered with Jina AI, it supports AI-powered similarity search, making it easy to locate assets. Users can also perform mesh-to-mesh, text-to-mesh, and colour-to-mesh searches. The search engine learns from large data sets, understands the shape, text, and colour of the asset with neutral network algorithms, and finds the most relevant results. The engine will continue to learn as more people use it, meaning it will understand more as time progresses.

Joel Fällbom, Head Teacher of Game and UX Design, at Futuregames, said: “As someone who has spent countless hours looking through every single asset store, finding high-quality assets, with real-time previews, with all the necessary info such as polycount, topology, lods and textures is really time consuming and difficult. In fact, it is close to impossible to navigate and find what you need. YAHAHA 3DSearch solves a real problem for anyone developing a game, I can’t wait to try it.”

In the closing months of 2022, Yahaha Studios announced it had secured an investment of $40 million to further build upon the Early Alpha success of YAHAHA, a creator-focussed user-generated content social platform. YAHAHA is currently open in Early Alpha, offering anyone the opportunity to be among the first to test the platform and share feedback as it continues to grow. This early community has an important role to play in how YAHAHA will evolve, influencing the shape the platform takes and building its digital world.