GameTextures.com - It's like CGTextures, but for video games!
polycounter lvl 8
http://www.gametextures.com
Hey Guys,
Just wanted to share with the community what a few of us Polycounters have been up to for the past year or so. So yeah, announcing GameTextures.com is the point of this post!
What's the difference?
Well, all of our textures tile and are made by hand specifically for use in video games. They're all in resolutions divisible by 2 (256 all the way to 2k), and come bundled with diffuse, specular, gloss, normal (y- and y+), height AND transparency maps.
Anyhow, special thanks to Damian Lazarski (TeaAndCigerettes) and John Valenti (aajohnny) for the help with texture creation and advisement. And of course, a very, very special thank you to Polycount. You guys have been there for me forever, and I'm so glad to be part of such a special community.
Here are some of my favorite textures on the site. I'm sure you'll have favorites of your own, since there are 700 or so to choose from, with 100 more being added a month.
btw, all accounts are 50% off right now with the coupon code: totallyAwesome
Hey Guys,
Just wanted to share with the community what a few of us Polycounters have been up to for the past year or so. So yeah, announcing GameTextures.com is the point of this post!
What's the difference?
Well, all of our textures tile and are made by hand specifically for use in video games. They're all in resolutions divisible by 2 (256 all the way to 2k), and come bundled with diffuse, specular, gloss, normal (y- and y+), height AND transparency maps.
Anyhow, special thanks to Damian Lazarski (TeaAndCigerettes) and John Valenti (aajohnny) for the help with texture creation and advisement. And of course, a very, very special thank you to Polycount. You guys have been there for me forever, and I'm so glad to be part of such a special community.
Here are some of my favorite textures on the site. I'm sure you'll have favorites of your own, since there are 700 or so to choose from, with 100 more being added a month.
btw, all accounts are 50% off right now with the coupon code: totallyAwesome
Replies
You'd better believe it homie!
The "create a free account" url text in the free examples is way too grey and indiscriminative though.
Thank you very much for the compliment. I recolored the text in question. Thank you!
@TeeJay - Yes, for me that is part of the fun, for others it's definitely a drag. While you and I enjoy texturing, I know there are others who aren't such a huge fan. Thank you for the feedback!
Having a base of textures to go off of that are designed to work with games is a HUGE help. Not only are they great for rapid development with pretty results, but I can see many of them being able to be modified to fit my needs. The inclusion of both Y+ and Y- normal maps per texture is pretty damn brilliant, too. :thumbup:
Also, how can I say no to Damian Lazarski? Shut up and take my money.
If you gave me some example images of some useful hair textures I'd love to add them. As it stands, I'm not quite sure how best to add them. Any thoughts?
http://d1uruifvv9vlhc.cloudfront.net/files/2/838/14-clothing-textures-screenshots-3.jpg
http://www.3dmd.net/gallery/albums/textures/hair/straight_dark_hair_texture.jpg
as far as the clothes go. they can be on cubes just like your surface textures, but the hair if you made it so that you could see it as a strand with an alpha on a plane. I think that would help sell it. And the skin could go on like a more rounded organic form like a sphere. The website is really awesome, but as i am trying to do more characters than enviroment/asset modeling and texturing it would be cool to see more character stuff :P
Conversely, I think the commercial account is too low. They can afford a higher subscription because they have the funds to pay for it from selling their complete games in stores. They use those textures to enrich their business. They can afford more than $60 a month. Hell, I'm sure they pay actual artists more than $60 a month for the amount of work they do. $60 a month sounds like a massive discount compared to professional artists.
I would suggest a restructuring of your pricing tiers, based on bandwidth rather than simply the size of the textures. For example: at $5-$10 a month (which is $60-$120 a year, perfect for someone doing game art for a hobby and not as business), you get access to 1024 TGA textures and you can download 50 MB a month. At $200 a month, you get access to 4096 PSD textures with layers intact and you can download 1 GB a month. I'm not sure of your hosting costs, so I can't nail down a proper price with that in mind, but I think you get the idea.
I just think there needs to be a wider distinction in price and level of service between basic and commercial tiers. It would reduce the risk aversion towards the price and make the costs more equitable for commercial use in relation to paid artists. You'll get more customers and won't devalue the need for professional artists, yourselves included.
Anyway, I think the site is a great idea and will be very useful to those who need quick textures or don't have the talent to make their own. I imagine this being a huge benefit to modding teams that are short a texture artist. I'm not trying to come down on you guys, it's a really good thing you're doing, but I felt that it won't be as successful under the current pricing model.
Only later I found out that there were many, many more over at the category pages.
It's a communication error, but it's one that could turn many people away.
I also agree that the pricing structure could be improved, but I'm not entirely sure which method would work best. Overlord's post is a decent start, and you might also consider having a cheap standard license for NonCom/Portfolio work, and then an option to buy specific textures for commercial releases.
@snader you're very right. I'll fix that immedietly.
Thank you for the feedback Perna! It is very appreciated.
As far as pricing goes, that will be the next iteration. Thanks for the feedback.
-removed humor
-updated prices
-introduced download limits
-removed blog/news columns from home page (for now)
-Added link to the category browser on home page (Get access to hundreds of textures!)
-Updated payment structure for several plans to be billed monthly instead of lump-sum style.
As far as the server issues, I'm working with our host right now to upgrade our machines, Perna.
Thanks for all the feedback guys! You truly are the best.
But anyway, great resource and definitely fills a hole in the market.
If your looking into how to expand your library in the future I would recommend diffuse + height map from photographs. You would essentially go out and take your 'CGTextures' source photo, but then also take the same photo from multiple points of view. Push all that data through Autodesks servers and out comes your accurate height map. The customer would then take this layer of diffuse and height into an application like Mari or ZBrush and essentially do all your texturing, blending etc... in a 3d application.
At least that's my crazy opinion anyway, I can't see the next generation being powerful enough, but it could be unique enough to provide us with the memory to not worry about tiling as much as we do now. At least from a prop stand point.
Anyway, rambling :P
I like the site a lot so far, and it's cool browsing the current available textures. Can't wait to see how the site expands. Also, way fast on the feedback which is a great sign.
I understand what you're saying and agree, however there are a lot of benefits to working on a single style for this type of website, the most obvious being that all of our textures *should* play nice with each other if used in an environment. Having a shmorgishboard of styles is a plan for the future, but for now it made more sense, at least in my opinion, to keep things in the same style.
Thank you for the feedback. :thumbup:
Good question. There are a lot of uses for them, and yeah, it's a huge gamble on my part. It's difficult to say if there is a market for them, as nothing like this has ever really been tried.
That's the risk of starting a company though, right?
Our target audience may not be professionals, I'm more pointing it at game designers, mod teams, students, and hobbyists who enjoy creating levels.
Our textures all work really well with eachother, and it's very easy to plop them into UDK, CryEngine, Source, really whatever and create blend shaders and make complete environments really quickly, for prototyping or otherwise.
As an example: I've invested only a few hours into this scene in UDK using only our textures, all I had to do was make some modular static meshes (planes) and throw them in game.
almost immediately I have a full scene ready for the next phase of development. It took almost no time at all.
Using all of the height-maps and texture images included you can get pretty much unlimited use from the library that we already have. Imagine when I have twice as many in there.
In other news, Woot! Thank you so much to everyone has signed up. You've given me so much feedback already. I
was maybe a bit too harsh..
good work, i hope that you do a bit on the navigation..
1, you really ought to sell these all individiually/in small themed sets on the Unity store, with a link back to the gametextures website in the description for each. Look at it as an additional marketing avenue for the subscription that also leverages your collection for another revenue stream. I'm really surprised you haven't done this already, the Unity Asset Store is like the perfect place for this kind of stuff.
2, Personally, looking through the texture collection, I see a lot of textures that feel like they ought to be grouped together, because they're simple adjustments or palette swaps. Why are blue and red filing cabinets different textures when it's a 5 minute photoshop effort to make them blue vs red? When you have bare, painted, and rusty metal versions of a grate, why are they separate when they're obviously meant to be used together?
Thanks for the questions. We're working on the Unity store link up right now.
2) The textures are seperated mostly because of the file sizes they would end up being. You see, the different versions of each texture have different specular / normal / height / transparency/ gloss maps. While they are meant to be used together, perhaps you would rather not use them together. Then you are unzipping a several hundred megabyte zip file into your work directory with multiple textures that you will not use.
Having them separate, while giving users an easier way to see their textures in the category browser, also allows a user to more closely understand what is included in their download.
That is something we've been throwing around in our minds for quite some time - And if you will look inside of some of the textures, we do combine multiple diffuse textures in many of the textures - but like I said, it is easier and less confusing to download them separate and be able to control exactly how they will be organized in your file structure and hierarchy.
tl;dr - If you see two textures which look alike, except, say, one texture is clean, the other is rusty they are separated because they have different support (specular, normal, gloss, etc.) texture maps and are in fact different textures.
For example, A clean texture:
http://gametextures.com/index.php/architectural/metal-textures/clean-metal/matt-clean-metal-fence-arad-22.html
and its rusty alternative version:
http://gametextures.com/index.php/architectural/metal-textures/metal-derelict/dirty-metal-fence-arad.html,
While they may look similar, their other texture maps are completely different.
That's going to go down well when 50% of a class all turn in a project using the same textures
http://www.surfacemimic.com/gallery/
And are the normals quick made with ndo2?
Personally, as an animator who is interested in modelling, but sucks as texturing.... these could definitely be good for me when I want to set up a little scene and not have it look like balls.
I love the dedication, and I've already passed it along to my boss (indie studio).
That is a good idea, and addresses the thoughts I was having.
That way the user can alter lots of variables quickly but with quality made layers.
You'd be more likely to pay for something that gave you good flexible assets that you can quickly look at and assure that it can be made to fit your needs quickly...
Paying for an asset that might need reworking heavily is bad... and essentially is actually a lost sale.
And if the builds are consistent then users start to build an affinity with the layers and conventions so they can work with them even more quickly.
I think it's a good idea and worth a punt. Obviously in business there are risks so you have to go with the flow and try things out. As long as you are open to making it fit what paying users actually suggest/want then you will do well from it I think.
Dave
Not really, no. The normals are either baked out, and supplemented with detail from NDO, or just made by hand by painting our own heightmaps and taking the texture from there.
Thanks for the questions!
@Slipsius - Thanks very much! It's appreciated. If he has any questions or whatever feel free to contact me here or my personal email - tanner@remotecc.com. I'd love to chat!
@mrWhippy - I really want to do this, I think adding PSDs to the images would be amazing, and I have them all - I believe that is something that we will work toward in the future. The issue with consistent builds and layer hierarchies is that each material is a bit different and each artist makes them a bit differently. It's not all me, there's an entire team of people working with me on this. Do you have any thoughts on how we may accomplish this?
Thanks guys. I'll make some contacts over there today.
Interesting - I mean, all of our PSDs are in the same heirarchy and grouped the same. So one thing we could do is include all different variations in groups (dirty, clean, painted, for example) and allow the user to just mask between layers they like and don't like. Then it would just be a matter of saving out of photoshop which wouldn't take tons of time. Hm. Okay, I think I'll get the guys on this. Thanks!
But just Brick and Roof Stuff
Nice idea though, as others have said it probably isn't suited for artists unless we're doing quick mock-ups that will never see the light of day, I wouldn't personally pay $15 a month for that but I can imagine some people would.
I might however, be tempted to take a look at a handful of textures if they were "pay as you go", I certainly don't want to tie myself into a subscription but there may be times when it would be beneficial to grab one or two texture sets, y'know?
I'd just spend 5 minutes going through a few PSD's each, maybe have a round of comments if anyone has some major issues with anything, then put them up for download with a clear 'comments' section on the page where the texture is provided so users can give feedback too.
Just keep working at them and updating them until you feel you have a PSD structure that works for everyone.
If you try plan it to perfection before moving you'll realise there is no such thing as perfection, and you'll never actually get to release stage.
Best to release something that's had some eyes over it and then improve it from there with feedback.
In the end your user base are the best product testers, and a new innovative product/service can be collaborative with users to make it better over the first year or so.
No one expects it to be right straight away, just close enough to make it worth trying out
I guess you just create an RGB PSD and then create a ton of folders with nice naming, like AO, spec (rgb), gloss, normal, diffuse, colour tint masks etc.
Then you just start getting each 'folder' looking how you want it and then drop each folders contents to the appropriate channels in your LUT's.
If people are being truly dishonest it's always been hard to review what work people have or have not done.
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of tell tale signs that alert you to something not being quite right without checking EVERY texture on the internet or in existing games to check it's not copied
Dave
Thanks Dave!
Yeah, I think that's probably the best way to go about it - As for the pay as you go structure, that is actually set up already. It's mostly a matter of testing it, pricing it fairly, and then turning it on. Any idea what that price might be? .99? $2?
I'm pretty irked that, unless I pay for a "Corporate" license, I don't have access to 2048 textures. That sounds like something that should be in the "Pro" plan. What do you think the difference between a professional and someone who uses textures commercially is? Your basic package targets hobbyists and pro's. If you're going to stick with 1024, drop the pro part.
I would sign up for Pro today if you bumped up the res to 2048. You could drop the downloads per day down to 25 and I'd still be happy about it.
Also, sorry... lol, one last thing:
Does anyone here seriously use textures they get raw? I always take my textures and composite them in some way. Has anyone anywhere ever been called out for using textures of the wrong license type? Probably not! Who can tell!? I think it's just kind of silly to assign commercial licenses to something so ambiguous in the final product. I get your dilemma though. It's just something I've noticed in multiple places and I always left scratching my head.
Cool site overall. I'll keep an eye on it.
+1 these sub based systems never seem to make sense. Let's see what works out best for me:
Situation a: I need <450 textures. I take out a basic membership, cancel it so i pay for 1 month, and download 15 textures a day until it ends.
Situation b: I need >450 textures. I take out a pro membership, cancel it so i pay for 1 month, and download 50 textures a day until it ends.
Obviously b works out much better value than 2-3 months of basic membership for the same number of textures so it's a no brainer. After that, what's there to make me stick around until you build up another x amount of textures for me to download in 1 big batch some time down the line? Unless of course recurring memberships isn't really your goal, in which case why go subscription based in the first place?
I understand, and these are issues we've thought about - But, if a user wants to do that, who am I to stop them? I don't mind. I really hope they enjoy the textures. It's been a lot of fun making them, and I'd be very grateful that they were that interested to download them all.
In the end, like I've said above, all business is a risk. This has been a great chunk of my time and savings, and honestly, I wouldn't trade it for anything. Whether people stay subscribed, or subscribe for a month and download them all. Shrug. I only hope that they are enjoyed.
Cheers
And I would totally buy them a la cart if I could. That would be a great addition to the site. I dunno $1-$2 a texture or something. That would be aces...
Hey thanks warren, yes we just received that bug report. It should be fixed in just a bit. Thanks for your patience.
That's fair enough, it just seems like if you aren't fussed about people making repeat subscriptions, a subscription based service seems a little strange :poly124: Then again i'm no business person and don't know whether any alternatives would work out better!
Anyway i just tried to sign up and it doesn't want to accept my card. Oh well.
Hey Skillmister - Send me an email - tanner@remotecc.com. I can tell you what's up.
@warren - Thanks man, the subscription is just the most obvious answer. I mean, we want to keep making textures and I have employees here helping me. Anyhow, the a'la cart option should be here within the next few weeks.