Indigo Renderer Forum

Hi Guys,
It just occurred to me the other day that I've made tons of hi-res seamless textures based on 10mp photos, which some people might find useful. They range from parquet to wood, fabric, stone, metal, walls, tiles etc... Most also have hand-made bump and reflectance maps.

What do you think would be the best way to distribute them online - either free or for a small fee? I thought of setting up a website but I'm a complete noob (I really mean this) and it always felt like way too much work. Turbosquid is no option cause they want me to get and fill all sorts of US tax forms I can't be bothered to even start looking for. I'm not sure about the free sites, like CGTextures, cause they have mainly unedited, untileable raw images and a lot of work has gone into mine... So I'm at a loss. Any idea???

how many? how big a download would that be?
if you want to share them here you would be a hero
but perhaps visitors could donate something for the privilege and a small % would help out with the indigo website upkeep?
so..you get space and a return on your effort, ono gets more visitors come looking around - and it helps provide a community forum (or at least the downloads pay their own way), and we get a local texture resource

That's an idea. I've been a donator in the past but surely among the stingiest. Taking a symbolic fee and sharing the proceeds with the site sounds like an option, unless Master Ono feels this conflicts with the free nature of Indigo, which I would fully understand.
This has actually not so much to do with making some bucks - more trying to find a good balance between providing the guys and girls here with reasonably good textures to work with without creating an incitement for everybody else to mass-download stuff they will never use - or worse, stuff they will resell elsewhere.
The other issue is of course size. Most of the maps are quite big and since almost every one has a reflectance and a bump/displacement map, they make for big downloads. No idea whether this would be manageable here.

I think ono has said we are not using near our traffic yet
I don't suppose it would cost too much more for some extra if needed.
Again , how much space? 1mb each? maybe 5 groups of 10?
dunno talk to ono about it...

I think we're roughly talking about a hundred textures right now (not all of them are really good). Size varies a lot but would be roughly between 1mb and 3mb for each map (time three if you count bump and reflectance). Again, that's a very rough calculation. The reflectance maps, for instance, tend to be half the size of the diffuse map as you don't need that much resolution. On the other hand, some bump maps are actually heavier than the diffuse maps they go with.

hmmm ok quite a bit then ...maybe you offer a new set of 10 -20 every month?
helps even traffic out and keeps interest going

If we can find the right way to do this, I could certainly imagine doing that. I could group them by themes, for instance.
One option would be to make all low-res versions of the maps available for free. Although that's already beginning to sound like too much work...

the very good ones with small fee, the others for free^^ - usually, free stuff from commercial pages aren't the best things, but "quite" good examples, I'd say...

Sounds fair. Still not quite sure how that would work in practice on the site here, or if it can at all.

It will be hard, to do it on this site, indeed....
you need to ask Ono, who needs to prog in a difference between free ware pics and pay ware ones....
I guess, you should use a different site, which directly has that support^^

We can set up an indigo WASTE network, if you'd like.

Zsouthboy: I'm sorry and ashamed but this is Chinese to me. How would that work?

how about host it on rapidshare ?

it's free and can hold quite a large amount of size

-Create a gmail account: texturesatgmail.com or something like that

-email that account a few textures per email; from: texturesatgmail.com to: texturesatgmail.com

-give that account email/password to anyone that you would like to share the textures with.

-they go "check" their email and are able to save the textures.

there is really no limit to a gmail account, I've seen this done before, with great success, by other people wanting to share stuff.
Of course, this is if you are willing to share them for free.

you could also create a google group and just upload the textures there and give access to people. it's really easy

crc's gmail idea sounds good.

About the large filesizes: you could prob use 7-zip to compress PNG images very small.