Jamey wrote:......... I'm always open to suggestions and criticism, basically anything that can make me a better texture designer
Jamey - first, thanks for your efforts! You definitely have the eye for this work!
If you're looking for suggestions........
- Those that have suggested you organize your postings differently have a point: as more and more of your images accumulate, they will be difficult to browse. Photography and stock-image pros have software and systems specifically for organizing their images under categories, be they image subject, image size, tileable/non, and so on. Usually, in order to enhance fast browsing of what may be very large images, the posters display these libraries of categorized images as thumbnails that will download quickly; the users can select these thumbnails in order to download the full-size images. Sometimes the full-size images are stored and downloadable in a variety of resolutions/image sizes. Here are a few of the existing resources of
free images online, so that you can get a feel for how they organize their image libraries:
http://www.cgtextures.com/http://www.burningwell.org/http://www.oneodddude.net/FreeTextures.phphttp://imageafter.com/...and URU stalwart bpgisme has her own gallery of tileable textures at
http://bpgisme.com/galleryimages/design/index.html- As you might guess, hundreds or thousands of images stored at multiple resolutions can eat up a lot of server space. While the suggestion of setting up an account on an external service such as photobucket makes sense, it'd also be pretty neat if we had an internal library of the resources we develop, for our own use; one that wasn't quite so available to the general public. I don't know whether the host of this site has either the storage or the bandwidth resources to sustain the kind of internal service I'm imagining - maybe Tsar Hoikas has some input on this?
- The grail of texturing is the seamlessly tileable texture that can be repeated over your model (without showing the seams at its edges as it repeats). Some months ago there was a thread here about tiling, but I can't seem to find it now. A couple of really great apps for creating seamless tileable images were discovered and discussed, as I recall the best were
Seamless Texture Generator at about US$35, and
Genetica, at about US$100 for a basic version up to US$700 for their ultrapro version!
....both are available as free temp demos.
Keep it up, Jamey! I think you've initiated something here that can develop into a great resource specially tailored to the needs of the agecrafting community!