Texture site feedback

Joost

So I've been working on this site for a while as an alternative (not a replacement) to selling texture packs on Gumroad. 

https://texture.ninja/

Please check it out and let me know what you think. Whether it be about features, pricing, content or whatever.
Currently the site is completely free. Once it's more stable I will make it paid only. If I can earn enough money I'll hire a web dev to allow free users to download a few textures a day as well.

to-do:

test stability + get feedback
curate content
more textures!
logo

Marshkin

Thanks for sharing! I'm a big fan of your texture sets. 

Couple pieces of feedback
1) Are you able to group your textures by type? Ie the first Square was wood, but further down you have bark. Having similar textures on the same row might make it easier to use
2) No license info Usually when I go to a texture site, that is the first thing I want to know (I understand that this might be behind a paywall at some point, so might be a moot point)
3) The way your site works, when I click on a section (ie: Wood) I can not hit the back button in my browser (which is mapped to a mouse side button in my case), so it actually took me a few seconds to find the back button at the top of the page. The flow feels clunky
4) Your menu on the top right is a dark grey, this makes the items look greyed out (inactive). I would also increase the spacing between them to make them stand out a bit more.
5) Some aspects of the site are slow. Ie: Clicking on pricing took me a few seconds before anything happened. 
6) The boxes being different sizes on the pricing make my OCD sad.

blankslatejoe

I agree with everything Marshkin said--especially the slow part: the whole site was INCREDIBLY slow for me. That seems like it's already on your radar though.

The other thing I kind of wonder about is, philosophically, whether this makes sense as it's own site. As a massive pack on gumroad it's awesome, but as an a la carte service I feel like the offerings are underwhelming; these are just well captured/lit photos, which are great as reference and overlays, but you can't just slap them on an asset and call it a day, like you could with cgtexture.com stuff--there's a lot of photoshop work that would need to be done to your photos for tiling, sizing, evening out the lighting, etc.

There's nothing wrong with that when you offer things "as is" on gumroad, but as a standalone site you start inviting people to compare your site to other service sites...so it really comes down to how much legwork you plan on putting into the site and into the textures.

I hope that's not discouraging--I love your stuff! :-)

Joost

@Marshkin

Thank you for the feedback, much appreciated!

1 bark has been added to wood.
2 I will add license info soon
3 It will take some work to fix this but I think it's feasible at least
4 It was supposed to be white but it was grey on <1440p displays for some reason. Should be fixed now
5 Yep, I think I'll have to get dedicated hosting but I can't really afford that right now.
6 Fixed, mostly.

@blankslatejoe

Yep, it's infuriatingly slow right now

I'm not trying to compete with CGtextures -at least, not at first.- All of my textures can be downloaded for free or bought for a relatively cheap price on Gumroad and they will stay on there. I'll also keep releasing new texture packs. With this site, I'm trying to offer a more convenient way to browse for people who don't want to fill up their hard drives with big texture packs. But mostly I see it as an extra incentive for people who like what I do and want to support me so that I can work on more textures. Which is why I was planning on having a Patreon page for my textures as well, with access to the site being the reward.

I'll probably also add my HDRis at some point.

The lighting is much more even for my latest textures but the old stuff definitely needs some work. And I will delete some of the worst offenders.
Personally, I never use the tiling textures from cgtextures. Not sure if it would be worth it to start adding seamless textures.

It is a little bit discouraging since I've put in a lot of work already and I've spent a fair bit of money on various things. But hopefully, there's enough interest to at least break even.

blankslatejoe

Ah, I was going to mention Patreon--it sounds like that might be a good options for you while you figured the site out.   As for seamless tiling, I dont use Cgtextures often, but having tiling allows them to be quickly injected into a pipeline easily. You can always manually build tiling from a good texture library like yours, but when you are talking about saving people time with prepurchased textures, time itself is as much a currency as the dollar is... While I don't know if it's worth your time to start making textures tiling either, its a good idea to be mindful of what the competition offers and adjust your price accordingly.

But yeah, I totally don't want to discourage you since I want to see more texture libraries like yours..and I can also see your point about offering a convenient way to browse/download individual textures. Best of luck to you!

Joost

https://texture.ninja/

It's been a long time but I basically started from scratch. The website is now hosted on AWS so it's much, much faster. More expensive as well ($100-$150/month) but I'm hoping that will pay off.

The site will be completely free to use until December 1st so take advantage of that and download some free textures, if you'd like.

After that it will be paywalled ($5/month), until I can save up enough money to hire a web dev.

If you have any feedback or if you run into any problems, please let me know!

to-do:

test stability + get feedback
curate/organize content
more textures!
commission a logo ($)