Well as you can see we have not updated the site yet, we simply have been to busy to get it out the door as we had hoped. Plus we want to make sure it works and of course works well before we launch.
On a positive note, we have finished up some of the big projects we have been working on and will be able to focus a lot of time towards TextureArchive.com
Thank you for being patient with us, we just need a bit more time.
Updates, soon, we promise
Zebb
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We have been pretty mum on any details about Texture Archive Two and have said very little on the fact that we have even been working on the next version.
Today I want to officially announce that we have been working on an update to Texture Archive, it’s not quite ready yet though. “boo, boo” they all say, frankly we agree.
We do however think we will have it up no later than May 1st, which is a long ways out yet, we know. We have a bunch of projects coming together around that time and they all fit pretty well together, but we have a lot to do still in a short amount of time.
The details on Texture Archive Two:
- May 1st launch date (hopefully)
- Member sign-up page will be scaled way back and will be much easier to create an account, we understand the registration page now is a huge hassle, so this will be changing, still required, but a lot easier.
- Streamlined site, heavy with nice clean CSS, AJAX for ease of use in some areas etc.
- Site should be faster and easier to use.
- Cleaner menu, works better across all browsers.
- Tokens = blah, originally we used tokens because originally the site wasn’t free, later we went free and tokens were used to control traffic, TA2 gets rid of tokens all together (yay!) We have yet to get even close to eating up our bandwidth so Tokens are getting thrown out the door.
- For now on TA1 I have bumped everyone up to 10,000 tokens, which should be plenty
- We would like to have the issue where we need to think about buying more bandwidth, so help us get to that awesome type of problem. We have 3500 gigs of bandwidth, and use only about 10 of it every month at this point.
- Textures = Yay! Obviously the site was built around textures, this was the main draw that we were aiming for. Unfortunately, we have been pretty weak at adding new textures and the site hasn’t really grown in # of textures since launch. In part it’s because our upload process is slow and tedious and partly cause we are just really busy doing other important things.
- When we launch the next version we will be adding close to 2000 more textures, so you can look forward to that.
- The best part however, is that we are adding support for all of you to upload your textures to the site if you want! Many of you have your own textures just sitting around doing nothing, so we decided we would give you the opportunity to do something with them. We certainly can’t pay you or anything of the sort since everything is free and advertising really doesn’t bring in much (we don’t make enough to pay month bills for the site, doh).
- We will be giving you credit for the textures you upload and of course a link to your site if you choose. Hopefully you will get more traffic to your own site which we think is a win win for everyone.
- So if you are interested in uploading textures we suggest you get started now getting organized for when we launch. At the top of the current thumbnail pages on TextureArchive.com there is a link to download a folder set of all our categories that we use, go download that and organize your textures accordingly.
- We are working on a solution that will make uploading as easy as possible, still a lot of work (mostly in getting organized) but the rest should work pretty well (we hope)
- Simply organize your largest and best textures into folders for now, we’ll give more instructions a bit later on what to do next.
- One nice thing is we will be creating the preview and thumbnail versions on approval for you so that cuts your work down quite a bit.
- *note: we won’t accept textures smaller than 1500px wide or tall, our goal is to keep our textures as large as possible. Each texture will be looked at and approved or declined before showing up on the site, so think about image quality, watch out for shadows, strong highlights, blurriness, etc. Poor looking textures will be declined for the good of the site.
- Don’t worry to much about naming conventions, we will be renaming files on approval into the database.
- Currently we are using about 10gigs of our allotted 350 gigs of space, so our goal is to fill that 350gigs of space, and we need your help to do that. Just imagine how many textures would be available if we filled 350gigs of space! We would love to have the issue of getting more space, and we will certainly buy more space if needed.
- Besides textures, our wildly popular Zbrush brushes have been flying off the site, you all seem to love them. (Probably cause you don’t have to register to get them
- We will be adding over 150 new brushes to go with the 78 we currently have!
- And you may have guessed it by now, we will be adding in support to upload your own brushes to go along with ours!
- The new brushes we will be adding are all 1024 x 1024px in size instead of the small 256 x 256, bigger is better right?
- You will be able to upload your own brushes which MUST be in square format, minimum size of 256 x 256 pixels, and no larger than 1024 x 1024 pixels.
- Brushes will not be categorized, they will have a 125 x 125 preview image (which you must make) that you will click to download. For simplicity sake there will be not details about them, no uploaded by, # of downloads, etc. You will see the thumbnails and you click the ones you want to download.
- Again, these will also be renamed on upload and will need to be approved.
- So get started making cool brushes for everyone. Check out our current brushes for how to set up your image so that they work well in ZBrush or Mudbox.
- OR just wait till we have official instructions on how to set it up, coming in the near future.
Well those are some of the things coming on May 1st, we have a few other features we aren’t going to talk about just yet, but we think they are pretty sweet as well.
We look forward to continuing to grow this site into something really useful, with these new features and a few others we think you’ll really find TextureArchive.com as a great resource for many of your texturing and design type needs.
We would like to hear your thoughts or ideas, we will certainly read everything, and try to add in as many needed ideas you may have.
Cheers!
