More than just a challenge: 3D Female Characters

Our newest 3D Challenge: Female Characters is about more than just prizes and awesome models. It also comes with a strong message.

We are holding our biggest challenge yet with over $8,500 in licenses, rendering credits and other prizes. There are no technical requirements, so every designer has a chance to participate and help create a friendlier virtual world for women. Everyone is invited to join the challenge by creating, sharing and promoting female-friendly 3D models.

VR driving the change for women

Women have been oversexualized in games, comics, movies and other mediums for decades. But all of this is changing with the advent of VR. Over 41% of VR users (i.e. early adopters) are women, and we’re seeing strong female developer teams focusing on VR in recent years, driving huge demand for female-friendly models on the market. It means that VR is offering a real opportunity to change how females were represented in the digital world.

We want to support every woman who wants to use or develop virtual reality, which is why we’re calling on you to be proactive in creating a friendly and inclusive environment in terms of the content available on 3D stock marketplaces.

We are very happy that our partners Allegorithmic, Marmoset, Quixel, Cebas, 3D-Coat, and FoxRenderfarm agreed to support this initiative by providing great prizes and exposure for the winners of the challenge.

The market is lagging behind

To understand how women are represented in the 3D world, we went through our Characters category and similar sections on competitor sites, and found that there are almost ten times more nude models of women than men!

How males and females are represented in a nutshell

We know some of you would suggest uploading more nude men to fix the disbalance, and we’re okay with that – we’re not going to go banning content or telling designers what to model. Nevertheless, we want to encourage you to create and promote realistic, non-sexual women characters.

Our lifetime marketplace data clearly shows the growing demand for non-sexualized female models: the most popular phrases with the keyword ‘woman’ on CGTrader are ‘woman sitting’, ‘woman standing’ and ‘woman walking’, with ‘woman nude’ trailing significantly behind. This means that designers in the 3D stock market can take advantage of a significant niche – modeling women, and for women.

Get rewards for doing good – join the 3D Challenge: Female Characters!