Short version: InkBunny, incorrectly, thinks 3D renders are screenshots. But only as an unwritten, unofficial rule. One that will still get your gallery nuked without warning. I'm not a 3D artist, but this policy is so monumentally stupid that I can't abide it. So I've hidden my IB gallery in solidarity with 3D artists, and won't post there until IB either makes this policy official (and explicitly states what attribution is required), or backs off on this nonsense entirely.

---

A while back (it's hard to know exactly when since they haven't made any official statements), InkBunny implemented a policy where they treat all 3D renders as screenshots. Yes, I was as confused as you. "Pressing the PrintScreen key" is, by definition, not at all the same as "painstakingly setting up a scene, rigging and posing models, configuring lighting, then having the GPU render it for hours or even days at a time".

They used this thoroughly flawed interpretation of what a screenshot is to start nuking the galleries of 3D artists, and while some pushed back to get their galleries restored, the administration (who only replied in journal comments rather than making any kind of actual announcement, naturally) made it very clear just how little they think of 3D artists by calling their work "just moving some sliders around". I'm not even a 3D artist and I was appalled.

When you dig into it, they hide behind the potential for assets in a 3D render to not be credited, which doesn't actually have anything to do with an image being a screenshot or not. Remember, IB also allows GenAI images, and the only credit you have to give is to the LAION model itself, which invariably contains an unknown number of unattributed stolen images vacuumed up from the internet en masse. Every single argument that IB made for removing 3D art utterly fails when applied to GenAI (these are all direct quotes from one of IB's site admins):

But it is not OK to have significant components attributable to a single source uncredited in a final work
...unless it's a GenAI piece that was entirely made from uncredited sources, of course. The defense to this is "there are so many sources you can't identify any particular one" and I would love to know which IB staff member is able to look at a 3D render and identify who made every single vertex in the background.

There isn't on the face of it anything wrong with derivative works, but they have to be credited and made with permission like any other submission
...unless it's a GenAI submission that only has to credit the model and not any of the tens of thousands of artists whose work was stolen, of course. Even 'better', the defense to that is "we can't hold GenAI to that standard because there's just too many people to credit" - wow! I never knew I could get away with plagiarism if I just did it too many times to count! Truly this is an enlightened policy. /s Not to mention that (almost) every other submission type has instructions on IB's ACP as to what credit has to be given, but 3D art has nothing, since it doesn't even have a section on the ACP at all.

We don't really want a bunch of generic models doing the same things to each other, which is what we were getting with Second Life, SFM, etc.
...unless it's generation #32,742 of Loona in the default GenAI art style, of course. This goes on and on.

Even worse, it's been months since this first cropped up in May, and they still haven't even made this stance official. IB's last announcement journal is from over a year ago. Their Acceptable Content Policy doesn't even have a section on 3D - or any mention of 3D at all. Even if you grant them "well IB thinks they're screenshots", the screenshots section doesn't have anything about required credit or attribution like other sections (such as audio remixes) do.

And if they treat the output of Blender as a screenshot because it counts as "other software", why doesn't GenAI get treated the same way? Apparently you have to have sculpted every single vertex in a 3D render yourself, by hand, starting with nothing but the default Blender cube, for it to be allowable. (But you can just throw prompts at Stable Diffusion and post a batch of 6 images to IB as much as you want, no problem)

I was wondering if maybe they were dragging their heels on this, or perhaps just trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug and forget about it... but nah, I've found more 3D artists still getting their galleries wiped as of a couple days ago. So today, I went from merely not posting, to hiding my entire IB gallery.

The end result of IB's unwritten policy is a Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every 3D artist on IB - they don't know if they'll wake up to find their galleries wiped, and they don't even know what steps (if any) they can take to avoid that fate!

The most charitable explanation for this is sheer incompetence. The alternative is targeted malice: the IB staff use this ludicrous definition of "screenshot" to remove people and content they just simply don't like. Take your pick.

Either way - I stopped posting on IB in May and now I've gone the extra step of hiding my gallery on IB entirely. I'm only posting on FA and Weasyl for the foreseeable future.