With Or Without

Hi,

As a texture artist I was wanting to get an idea of the general publics preference when buying texture packs, Do you prefer packs with or without contact sheets?

Do these help? are they nessacary, do you care?
Kind Regards
Nat

I prefer with, so it is easier to go through and find the textures that look like they will work well with the build I am working on.

Otherwise you have to click through in my case a couple thousand textures to find the ones you want.

Thank you for replying MortVent, Depending on the voting here I will probably update all my texture packs to add a contact sheet, But because I have quite a few I wanted to see if its worthwile or not

Nat

If it means more work for you.. I am all for it.

lmao aww what'd I ever do to you?

Hi Mac

*waves* Always great to see you, Nat.

As for your question, I prefer contact sheets but never fret if they don't come with the set. I don't have a sorter or hud for textures so I have to open them to view. Not many textures I have ever bought have come with contact sheets so that could be a good thing for you to do.

Thank you Mac

There's nothing worse than building when SL is running slow (which happens occasionally I hear) and you're trying out textures and have to wait 5 minutes for each to load.. and half of them are instant discards. At least with a contact sheet you can pick out 4 or 5 textures that might do the trick and then try just those... as MortVent says...

Of course this is also helped by not having 1024x1024 textures but that's another thread... !

Thanks for the reply Ee. I am going to update all my texture packs to include contact sheets.

Kind regards
Nat

I now buy my textures from a store that ALWAYS gives contact sheets, i dont have time to sort through thousands , even with a viewer...i LOVE contact sheets, and am more inclined to buy from a store if they have them

Thank you Faithless

QFT!!!

Fark. I just want someone who does both interior AND exterior matching windows with drapes in the same gd set.

My last sets of windows offered that. 5 different paint colors for the wood trim (one color per set) with inside and outside variations that had open curtains, closed curtains, and no curtains. I'll probably make a bunch more like that once I get my backlog of sim building contracts completed. They sell pretty well.

Pardon me if this is a silly question, but I'm NOT a builder.

Why is it that I can't seem to buy just one texture? I've been to several places to look for something and then find I have to buy a whole bunch of them to get just the one that I need.

I rarely build things and realize that those who do build a lot can certainly get the most out of packages. Is it not worth your while, as texture creator, to just offer them separately to folks like me? Or am I looking in the wrong place?

B.

For Builders who make things regularly, it's usually to your advantage to have things in sets that are designed to match. This allows you to make builds that look consistent, instead of looking like parts of the house were purchased from different salvage yards. So most texture artists create and sell their textures as matching or themed sets.

At TRU we have had single-texture vending set up before, but it's a real pain to maintain unless you have an advanced, database-driven delivery and vending system. So the singles vendors usually only contained a fraction of what we ofered.

Also, most vending systems offer no way to profit-split to different content makers on a by-item basis. So that meant that each artist has to have their own selerate singles vendor, or they have to sell the textures to the store owner for a one-time fee, and the store owner gets all the singles sales profits.

We're launching a new searchable, database-driven system at TRU that will, I believe, offer the option of buying textutes singly, or buying the bundle that they are part of, or referencing related bundles by artist or by themed set. But it is VERY complex to set something like that up if you have tens of thousands of textures to offer.

Hi B,

Thats not a silly question at all, To be completely honest, I haven't done them as singles purely because I didn't think about it, Now that you've brought it to my attention I will work on setting up some vendors to sell single textures as well as packs

Kind regards
Nat

I've never bought a texture pack that did include a contact sheet, which is probably why I've hardly used any of the hundreds (thousands?) of textures in my inventory. In-world texture-browsing is one of the most painful/tedious things about SL. A (labeled) contact sheet would be a big plus in my book.

um...what's a contact sheet? I am thinking, based on what's been written here, that it's one of those sheets that has a pic of all the textures...right?

Thank you for your feedback Wildefire

Hi Maureen,

Yes thats exactly what it is, and underneath the pics it has the name on texture as displayed in the pack

OH! If the contact sheet also showed whether a given texture were seamless vs. non-seamless, I would pay more for those textures than I would somewhere else. I HATE when people don't identify their seamless/non-seamless textures.

Excellent suggestion Wildefire.

Thanks! Well then, I vote for contact sheets! (not that I purchase textures very much..yet...)

Yw Maureen, Even thought you don't buy many texture yet your opinion still matters