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Do people still buy textures in SL?


ChinRey
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I bought some beach textures and some wood ones for my home. I'll tell you one I had trouble finding though but I have seen in game -- a texture that is part grass and fades to a sandy beach. I ended up paying someone to make one for me.

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It's 50/50 for me. I tend to purchase Texture Packs, bundles of 6-10 or more textures, wheras if I just need something specific or individual I create and upload the texture myself! I recall a recent purchase, i bought 6 hexagon-style cement flooring textures for over 100L$ just because they were just what I wanted and getting 6 different yet similar textures would have been too time-cosuming for me to design and upload myself! 

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Yes, probably not as many as I used to,  unless I have plans for something outside of SL (and then there is at least one texture maker - shame can't endorse here - that gave me permission to use some elsewhere).

If a set comes with matching materials versions too then another yes - saves a lot of faffing about (and usually cheaper in the long run) with uploading 3 for each required.

This is even with an inventory stuffed with - I shudder to think how many.

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Definitely. Some of my creator friends are old school builders who want to be able to just drop textures onto their objects inworld rather than spend their building time fussing with AO layers, complicated layouts and software. They also like mesh with lots of faces to facilitate that. And given how many FP mesh creators see lots of faces as a feature, that approach is probably popular.

I tend to get frustrated with the way a lot of inworld textures have beautiful shade and highlights which make for lovely little squares but unfortunate unintended patterns of light and dark when scaled down and repeated. I still buy, but not as much as I would like to. I end up making my own textures to get away from that. But then I'm making more and more of my own mesh because I don't like the way most FP mesh UVs are laid out. It feels like I'm a minority, stuck in between the everything from scratch crowd and the ones who get very creative with bits and pieces others have made. I will always have a look to see what I can find though.

Anyway, there is still a market for textures. You know how RL quilters collect pretty fabrics? Some people do that in SL with textures too. :matte-motes-smile:Are you thinking of tying some of them in with your mod bed or other products? That could be a winner with new residents and introduce them to one of SL's greatest strengths, DIY customisation.

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I make textures for clothes myself, but I buy on Marketplace, when I need some for buildings and other things. It´s very tedious to find textures that are free to use with googling, you often have to click through a lot that aren´t, even if you specified your search terms, and then often you need seamless textures and the choice for that is big in SL. So I kind of hope that textures I find in SL are okay to use in SL, but I rely on what the seller says in their ads. 

I'm definitely more likely to buy, when the listing says it´s original textures and the seller or their shop and all information makes the impression to me that they are honest, and like one other reply said, if the listing would allow for use outside of SL, for example even just for Open Sim too, it would make me more likely to buy, or pay more too.

 

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Mesh has probably changed the demand for textures. SL Builders have a greater need for textures they can use in 3D Max, Blender, and Maya than previously. Before mesh all those builders would be looking for their textures inside SL.

Now they need textures they can legally use in modeling programs to make the texture maps they bring in. Most CGI texure sites have licences that prohit the texture's use in SL, because of the ToS the Lab uses. Basically the objectional part is that any texture uploaded to SL becomes the non-exclusive property of Linden Lab to use how ever they choose and that is forever. That creates a number of problems for people making and selling textures. 

While it can be argued that the Lab is not and never will be in the texture selling business, not knowing what the Lab may do with a texture triggers many people's fears. Also, those that may have a future need for exclusive ownership of a texture have a problem with the Lab's ToS.

So, there is a market outside SL for textures that can be used within SL.

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

Mesh has probably changed the demand for textures. SL Builders have a greater need for textures they can use in 3D Max, Blender, and Maya than previously.

Yes but as EtheralTangents mentioned, it's hard to find legal base textures for baked ones outside SL. So I thought, why not offer them for sale on MP.

Adding some good looking shading and tacky looking light effects to a texture is one thing, creating a good base texture is much harder and not somthing most builders are ready to do. If you buy an original base texture on MP with a explicit permission to use it any way you like unmodified or modified within SL, you should be safe legally. Unfortunately there aren't that many good original textures available there. Take away all the upload of unmodified presumably PD textures and all the quick-and-dirty lightly modified (and completely unmodified) factory presets from a certain well known texture generator and you've eliminated a large amount of the textures for sale in SL (including most of the stock of some of the most popular texture merchants today).

I kind'a thought I could do better than that but whether people will buy is a completely different question.

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I just bought some textures from TRU Textures -  if you go to their Marketplace page you can get free samples to try out.

Added later: Somewhat sideways to the topic: I wanted to mention that two houses I bought recently, one from Porky Gorky, and one from Barnesworth Anubis, both came with copies of the textures used in the structures. This was a great help when I was trying to blend the houses into their environment, and probably helped reduce lag a little. I would recommend this practice to other home sellers.

I make a lot of my own textures for specialised purposes, but I do go to the texture markets when I'm in a hurry or when I think I lack the skills to make exactly what I want. I have a huge collection of free textures I've picked up over the years, but I don't have textures for every situation.

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just to chime in, I'm a full-permission content creator and the bulk of my sales are my textures.  I sell both normal textures and materials texture kits, and both sell the same amount.  So I would say yes, quite a lot of people still buy textures, but the bar for quality is much higher than it used to be.

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Mizzy Maltz wrote:

Just to chime in, I'm a full-permission content creator and the bulk of my sales are my textures.  I sell both normal textures and materials texture kits, and both sell the same amount.

Thank you Mizzy, that was really useful info! :) I suppose I'll give it a try then.


Mizzy Maltz wrote:

but the bar for quality is much higher than it used to be.

I don't think that'll be a problem. ;)

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  • 3 years later...

I rarely do, primarily because most are not optimized for SL, much less general online downloading. This is part of why there are 1024x1024 pixel textures on microscopic finger-rings. If I need a tiling texture for a floor, for example, I can create and upload a 96x96 pixel texture that will appear nearly instantly for all visitors. The same with any tiling texture. For signs and things I usually do a 256xYYY - YYY being only enough necessary for a proper aspect ratio.

When I maintained an in-world store, I rarely used any kind of scripted vendor and would use the selling option built into all prims. I would create a 512x512 "vendor" texture and it would contain four items on it (one in each quad) - then apply only the relevant portion to the "vendor" - now four vendors rezzed at the same time. And people wondered why my vendors always rezzed three to four times faster than everyone else's vendor in an in-world shopping mall (I date myself, those don't exist much anymore).

In the old days there were some really big Texture malls, the idea that it would cost you L$100 to upload 10 or you could buy it for L$50. But nowadays? No, far better to upload your own as you have the control over the optimization of the image with file-size:quality ratios.

Unfortunately, most people uploading textures into SL (or buying them) don't know how or have no control over that optimization. Combined with over-complex mesh with crappy LOD and so on, it's no wonder SL performance is pathetic at times.

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