As the year comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the most popular Hubs Creator Labs posts of the year. In this year-end review, we'll highlight the top posts of 2022 and share some insights on what made them so popular. Whether you're new to Hubs Creator Labs or have been following us for a while, we hope this retrospective will give you a chance to catch up on some of the most viewed content we've published in the past year.
Top 5 Tutorials
Jim and Jordan led us in 2022 with the most viewed tutorials. Unsurprisingly, the top tutorials by page view have to do with light baking, a notoriously complicated process in 2022. At number three, the multi-part tutorials around UV scrolling textures made for much better performance and gave more life and energy to our Hubs spaces. We received a lot of good feedback in the Hubs discord and tutorials have been a great driver to help improve experiences in Hubs.
1. Baked Lighting for Better-Looking Hubs Scenes
By: Jim
2. EZ Bake Lightmapping
By: Jordan Elevons
3. Animating Textures with UV Scroll Series
By: Jim
4. How to Optimize a Scene
By: Jordan Elevons
5. Sorting out Problems with Transparency
By: Jim
Top 5 Inspirational
Inspirational posts have a broad appeal and help provide context for how people are using Hubs and explore the possibilities afforded to us on the immersive web. As an open-source project, one of Mozilla Hubs biggest strengths is the ability to customize it to your needs and people from all over the world have been tinkering with Hubs. Our top inspirational posts largely document this strength. Here are the top five by page views:
1. 10 Amazing Examples of Hubs Extensibility
By: Matt Cool
2. Brands Pioneering the Metaverse Consider Mozilla Hubs
By: James C. Kane
Building "spatial analytics" for the (*gulp*) metaverse (read: the 3D open web) to help understand user behavior in immersive 3D worlds where Google Analytics can't go. Integrating w/ @MozillaHubs & @aframevr first. Apart data playback at "Flight of 🐝" speed, s/o @colinfizgig! pic.twitter.com/JDxJcq7Kwr
— jamesckane (@jamesckane) February 1, 2022
3. 5 Incredible Art Galleries
By: Matt Cool
4. Building the Metaverse with Open Source
By: Liv E.
5. Exhibitions that Educate
By: Matt Cool
Top 5 Tools
Tools posts refer creators to helpful applications, workflows, add-ons and websites. Manuel's Blender Add-On explainer served as a powerful entry point for folks getting started in exploring the Blender workflow in Hubs in 2022. Event hosts commonly referred to the web-based avatar creation tools found in number two, and posts from this Fall about AI textures and LOD quickly became popular with our readers.
1. What is the Blender Add-On
By: Manuel Martin
2. Quick Customized Avatars in Hubs
By: Matt Cool and Elgin-Skye McLaren
3. Hubs Friendly Tools
By: Matt Cool
4. Using AI Textures to Enhance Your Hubs Scenes
By: Christian Van Meurs
5. Hubs LOD Support
By: Takahiro Aoyagi
Top 5 Announcements
Hub's announcement of its new subscription service, offering easy creation of your own 3d space on the web, was our most viewed announcement of the year with other big announcements like Active Replica and the Hubs Artist in Residence program rounding out our top five.
1. The Next Generation of Mozilla Hubs is Here
2. Invitation to Join the Closed Early Access Beta
3. Hubs Artist in Residence Program Announcement
4. Welcome Active Replica
5. Welcome Our First Artist In Residence Cohort
Top 5 Community-Contributed Posts
Hubs Creator Labs launched in April of 2022 and allows community members to make proposals and contribute their own articles. We had eight community authors this year. Here are the top five posts from community contributors by views that were not already listed above.
1. Photogrammetry in Hubs
By: Eric Hupe, Mikko Huovinen and Matt Cool
2. Building an Enhanced Chat Experience for Hubs
By: James Robinson
3. Iterating Your Scenes Faster with Local Debug Scene
By: Conor Woodard
4. Bringing Learners Into the Immersive Web
By: Heather Elizabeth Dodds
5. Creating 2D Sprite-Based Retro Worlds
By: Pedro Valencia
Most Viewed Spotlight Post
Spotlights are a series of interviews with innovative Hubs creators highlighting their work. This year's most viewed post is the Society for Arts and Technology covering their artist and developer programs where they created customized exhibits that extended Hub's capabilities and showcased the creativity of artists leveraging 3d spaces. For a list of all the spotlight posts check here.
Society for Arts and Technology
That's it for this year's Hubs Creator Labs wrap-up!
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