How to find out the author of the model?

[Kzanna]

Help! I found this file, and I can’t remember whether I made this model myself or downloaded it.

Слон.blend

The elephant looks like something I would do. It is spherical, glass, and an elephant. Everything I love. The material used is from BlenderKit - I use it often and only recently started creating my own materials. Also, the name is written in Cyrillic, and all the models that I downloaded from the Internet were named in English.

But! The difference between the creation and the last modification of the file is 4 minutes. And I don’t remember at all whether I made an elephant (November 2022 was a long time ago). Since then, I’ve changed my laptop and upgraded Blender several times.

The file properties were useless. I compared them, they are absolutely the same for the elephant, the file that I definitely downloaded, and the file that I definitely made myself.

I’m 90% sure that this is my creation. The remaining 10% prevents me from using this model.

Ideas?
Also, is there an option in blender to sign your files? So that the problem does not happen again.

I hope I chose the right categories…

[NP5]

Never heard of any system. All I can suggest is opening a text window inside Blender and making a record of being the creator, the date and such like. Probably noting any part like a texture that came from somewhere else.

[Todd_Vance]

https://tineye.com gives zero matches. Doesn’t prove anything since you can’t prove a negative, but no image on the pages it has crawled is “similar” according to its AI (which is older than ChatGPT and DALI and others so might not be exhaustive).

[CoreyKnecht]

The only bullet here that suggests it’s not yours is the file’s metadata. Fortunately (in this case), metadata is easily poisoned, even accidentally, so it’s completely untrustworthy. In the quick and dirty Win10 test I did, copying a file from a folder to the desktop was enough to change the Modified date.

Unless you still have your old computer, you’re probably as much in the clear as you’re going to get with this model. Everything says it’s yours, but if you want to be absolutely certain, the only way is to remake it, and then it needs to meet the definition of “significantly different” (which is greyer than Eeyore on an overcast afternoon). Better than that though… it’s Blender: I’m sure you can find some inspiration to make Glassephant 2.0 with some new bells and whistles, and then it won’t even matter =)

For prevention, @NP5’s idea is what many seem to have done, but a couple of people pointed out that the scope of this seems to be .blend-wide, so it won’t follow your model if it’s exported and appended, etc. Adding a custom property looks like the better way to go and is also suggested:

Metadata / notes / comments in .blend files?

Is there a recommended way to put a copyright notice in a ~.blend file?

It’s worth pointing out that these are very old posts, but I think if Blender had a proper native solution, it would’ve popped up in the search.

[Kzanna]

@NP5, @Todd_Vance, @CoreyKnecht Thanks for the answers!

Thanks to you, I found the text in blender. For now, this looks like the simplest and most convenient way for me to sign my works. And write down work plans - I definitely won’t lose such notes.

And I will make the elephant again. Wonder, if I have learned anything in a year, and whether it will be noticeable.