I took my best 50 tileable textures and uploaded them to my wordpress based website with WooCommerce. I tested it out with “sandbox accounts,” and I’m pretty sure it works.
I just wanted to get some feedback on whether these textures are up to snuff with today’s current technologies such as pbr, or are these images “last gen” mostly? Also do you think the price is reasonable, and should I try to make a subscription option as I plan to upload my 3D models as well in the future?
There are 5 pages with 10 textures each, but I’m thinking about changing it so that there can be more than just 10 per page?
I’d suggest doing 12 per page, that way users can tell at a glance if they’ve run out of pages, as well as being a nice even number to display and fill out the grid.
To be perfectly honest those like like n64 era textures and the prices are ridiculous. Are those even textures sets with normals, speculars, metallics, roughness, etc. or are those just individual diffuse textures?
I’ve seen textures look a lot worse on their own but still look good in game. Of course the differences are the normals and spec/roughness/etc… maps, and I also don’t see any indication as to whether or not they’re included.
The listed resolutions are also not power of two, meaning either significant amounts of extra padding will be needed, or mipmapping and the like won’t be possible.
Thanks so much everyone for the feedback, I really appreciate it!
n00854180t - 12 does sound like a good number. I could perhaps make a 4 x 3 grid?
BlackRang666 - At the moment, they are just diffuse textures, and I agree the previews look quite bad. The new previews are going to be higher res, but with a watermark. Also if I can figure out how to do it, I’m planning on setting up a feature where the textures can be viewed on a rotatable sphere, cube, and plane in varying lighting situations. Would it be feasible to use these images to create the additional maps you mentioned with Photoshop only, or would I need some other software? (All of the images come from 12 bit NEF RAW files I took with my DSLR).
Veovis Muad’dib - I thought about scaling the textures down to 2048, but I didn’t, thinking that perhaps depending on the intentions of the buyer, he might want the full resolution. If he didn’t, he could size it down himself. Do you think it would be more desirable to size them down on my end, and if so, should I refrain from using such things as unsharpening filters?
HUD elements and sprites are often non-power of two sizes, but textures should almost universally be power of two. At least that’s what I’ve found in my experiences, there may be reasons I’m not aware of for why you might want to have odd sizes.
Whatever filtering method you use, make sure it looks good. That’s it.
Texture Tools Exporter | NVIDIA Developer is a tool for creating normal maps in Photoshop, though you’ll need to make heightmaps to use it. Height maps are black and white images, where black is the lowest area and white is the highest area.
For things like wood you can get away with making a new layer from what’s visible, desaturating it, and then adjusting levels and curves to get the look you need. More complex textures require more complex workflows.
Roughness is another black and white map, where white represents an area that should scatter reflected light too much to get a decent reflection (Rough like chalk) and black represents an area that reflects perfectly. (In other words, perfectly smooth) Again for something like wood, you can get away with something similar to what you do with heightmaps, but again more complex textures require more complex workflows.
That’s a really highly simplified and possibly wrong/misleading overview, you should go check out Unreal’s YouTube overview of materials, as well as searching for PBR (Physically Based Rendering) information in general.
I’ve heard recommendations for Allegorithmic’s tools before, but I’m just a designer/programmer at heart. I have little experience with texturing, only an understanding of the theory.
One thing that helps is to think of all the masks and maps (Except diffuse, which is what you’re already offering right now) as data rather than pictures. You’re just defining extra information per pixel of the image. A height map tells you how tall each pixel is. A normal map tells you what direction each pixel is facing. A roughness map tells you how well each pixel reflects light. And so on.
They’re really nice but you should really check out cgtextures.com. Honestly there’s very little you’d ever need that’s not there for free and the quality is outstanding. Paying for textures is kind of crazy when you think about it. I actually use my phone camera half the time.
kennyrosenyc - I love CGtexures so much I actually bought a year subscription (you get more data per 24 hours and access to higher res images). I can’t really compete with CGtextures in sheer quantity of images, so I’m thinking I could take my diffuse images and turn them into materials using Allegorithmic’s “Bitmap2Material” software. I’ve been playing around with the trial version (that’s why you see the watermarked logos), and this is the result I got when using my 26th texture as the source image. Would $1.99 be a reasonable price for a single material if it had all the additional maps (metallic, normal, height, AO, curvature, roughness, bump etc.) Or should I go to $0.99 per material in order to compete reasonably well?
integration - I didn’t know Quixel was putting out a free beta; I’m definitely going to try that out! Quixel obviously has much more advanced data capturing technology compared to what I can accomplish with just a Nikon D5100 that shoots 12 bit images (4096 luminance values). Should I compete by lowering my price to around $0.99 per material? (I’m afraid if I go too low people will undervalue what I offer).
$1.99 would be good for people who are looking for a certain Material (Singular transactions but lots of them) but $0.99 would be better if you want people to impulse purchase (Lots of transactions and hopefully lots of customers!).
n00854180t - I really want to make the materials progressively cheaper as you buy in bulk; all I have to do is figure out how to do that in Wordpress and my “WooCommerce” plugin. Instead of arbitrarily packing certain materials together myself, I think it would be cool if people could create their own “packs” simply by buying more than one texture at a single time.
KitatusStudios - I’m thinking of having the base price for a single texture be $1.50. Here’s a possible price model based on the fibonacci sequence.
1 Texture - 1.50
2 Textures - 1.40 each
3-5 Textures - 1.30 each
6-8 Textures - 1.20 each
9-13 Textures - 1.10 each
14-21 Textures - 1.00 each
22-34 Textures - 0.90 each
35-55 Textures - 0.80 each
And then cap it off at some point of course.
Also I’m having trouble with the huge file size of the various texture maps together. Just for the physically based shading model of metallic/rough, I’m getting well over 100 mb of data for a single material. I want to upload maps for other shading models, say the Disney BRDF model, but I don’t want each material to take an hour to download. Right now each map is 16bit 2K Tiffs. Is that overkill, or should I try to advertise the extra bit depth and non-compression as something positive?
I tried using 7zip’s lossless compression, but it only took off about 10 mb off each material. Does anyone know a better way lossless compression method than this?
I improved the previews of each material by giving sized down versions of every map alongside cropped 100% zoomed in versions.
Also the main thumbnail (the largest one to the left) is a render of the render inside Bitmap2Material.
The price for each material $1.50, but I haven’t figured out how to make them “cheaper by the dozen” so to speak yet.
I still need to figure out how to make the materials show up 12 each page. There’s enough room, but for some reason the 11th and 12th images load on the 2nd page. It’s weird.
Could I get some tips on how to improve from here?
The site layout looks good, once there’s 12 per page it’ll look better. I especially like the way you previewed the different maps. Make sure to always mention what maps are included on every image, because we can’t always tell one black and white map from another at a glance.
Only thing I would suggest from here, if you can’t get one of those fancy 3D render previews, (Like you’d see in the Material Editor window in UE4) is to provide some previews of the material that look 3D. Maybe apply the material to a cube and/or sphere, and let us scroll between the different previews?
Beyond that I’m not qualified to speak on art stuff, so you’ll want to talk to someone who understands that kind of stuff for advice and tips.
Veovis Muad’dib - I’ve downloaded a plugin that allows me to set a default number of products per page, and I set it to 12! Whoever browses the website can set it to 24, 36, or “all,” but of course I only have 12 materials uploaded at the moment, so changing that setting won’t make the page look any different right now.
Using another plugin I downloaded, I regenerated all the thumbnails for the products so that they are now higher resolution. Having them so pixely was quite frustrating. Turns out that even though I had uploaded them to Wordpress as 512x512 images, they were being automatically sized down to something like 300x300 without my knowledge. Grr. Well at least now it’s fixed.
I still want to have a 3D previewer embedded in each product page, but I don’t know what software would be best for PBR. Ideally, I would like to have a rounded cube, a sphere, and a plane as preview geometry along with an controllable light.
Does Verold support pbr, and if so, is this the best option for this sort of thing?
