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Useful Info, Handy Tools, Tips and FAQ
Some handy programs and plugins:
These links are to external websites and we therefore take no responsibility for the content on these sites.
Winrar - You will need this to extract the texture files you download from us.
TGA thumbnail plugin for windows XP - Browse TGA files in windows explorer.
DDS thumbnail plugin for windows XP - Browse DDS files in windows explorer.
DDS and normal map converter plugins for Photoshop - Create normal maps with Adobe Photoshop.
Nvidia Developer Tools - Some really useful programs and plugins.
Complete Textures - Product Information:
Category :: Self explanatory.
Scale :: Scale of features in the texture.
Repetition Factor :: How clearly you can see the texture repeating if you tile the texture. If the texture has a high repetition factor you should try to mix it with other textures or try not to tile it too much as you will see a repeating pattern.
Alpha Map :: Whether or not the texture package includes an alpha mask. Grass, leaves and needles typically have their alpha map stored in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. Other textures, like sewercaps or airvents have separate mask files stored in psd (Photoshop) file format, this makes it easier for our customers to mix textures; - such as adding a sewercap texture on top of an asphalt texture. An example of this technique can be found here.
Comment :: Usually has some specific information regarding the texture in question.
NOTE:
Most Complete Textures come with one high resolution and one low resolution heightmap. Because of the way parallax mapping works, you should try to avoid very sharp edges in the heightmap since they can easily create unattractive stretching. The easiest way to fix this is simply to reduce the resolution of the heightmap - this is technically the same thing as applying a blur filter. This is why we include the low resolution heightmaps - to spare our customers the trouble of doing it themselves.
We usually include a specularmap in the normalmap alpha channel because renderers which do not use colored specularmaps often read the specularmap from this channel. If your renderer uses colored specularmaps you should just delete this alpha channel. Some textures also contain one or more types of alpha masks, these are typically found in the alpha channel of the diffusemap and\or in a seperate psd (Photoshop) file.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):
Q: Why would I buy Complete Textures from Ultimate Textures when there are cheaper libraries available elsewhere?
A: We believe that many people are willing to pay extra for quality, but at the same time you should ask yourself what it would cost you to hire a full time artist which are able to deliver textures that match or surpass our quality in a short period of time. -If you take this into consideration you might find our prices interesting. Also it could be beneficial to have a reliable backup solution if your project falls short on time or you need to make a cruicial deadline. And we would like to mention that all our Complete Textures are fairly easy to tweak, meaning it should be trivial to create different texture variations or combine our textures to suit your needs.
Q: Why is there a blue / red frame around some images?
A: The frame indicates what type of image you are looking at. If it's a blue frame around the image that means it's a 'Free' image, however if it's a red frame, that means you are looking at a 'Member Exclusive' image.
Q: I bought a membership and it expired, doesn't monthly renewal work?
A: We do not currently support automatic monthly renewal of memberships. If you would like to continue your membership after the expiration date, you can easily purchase a new membership. If you buy a 30 Day Membership and it expires on 5th of June 2008 for example, and you buy a new 30 Days Membership on the 1st of Juan 2008 your new membership will be added after the expiration date of your current membership. In this example the new membership will commence on June 6th 2008 and the new expiration date would, in this case, be 5th of July 2008. You can buy multiple memberships at any time and the days will just be added to your expiration date.
Q: I just bought some files at your webshop and when I try to download them I only get "This is a webshop file and maybe you don't have access to it", how can I access my files?
A: First you need to log into your account. All our files are protected by a download system so if you are not logged in you cannot access your files.
Try logging in to your account and go to 'My Account', and at the bottom of the page inside the 'DOWNLOADABLE FILES' use the link(s).
Q: Sometimes there are people in the inspiration photos, why is that?
A: If there are people in the inspiration photos they are there as a scale reference.
Q: I can't download any more from your site, what is going on?
A: We have a download limit winch is reset every 24th hour, If you need more downloads you can become a member, that way you will get 3 times as many downloads per day, as well as the ability to buy additional downloads. The additional downloads you buy will start decreasing when your daily limit has reached 0. This limit is not reset like the normal download limit but will decrease by 1 for each download.
Q: How do you create your Complete Textures?
A: We apologize that we cannot go into detail here as we use proprietary techniques that have been developed over several years and so we consider our process a trade secret of Frost Software. However, we can tell you that we use many innovative in-house tools and some external tools to produce our textures and can confirm that many hours of manual work and hand-crafting go into each and every texture in our library. One of the tools we use is Crazybump, it's a great new tool for making realistic looking textures, however it does have its limits. There is simply not enough information in most ordinary photographs to generate fully realistic looking texture maps from them. For this reason, we have developed additional tools and techniques that give our textures that extra edge. We also spend a lot of effort and resources to capture optimal source images, which is ultimately the most important factor.
Q: When I apply your textures to my renderer they do not look the same as on the preview images, why is that?
A: Most render engines\visualization software read textures slightly differently to each other. Some engines might, for instance, multiply the normal maps twice as much or add less specular highlights than another engine. Try either tweaking the settings in the renderer or alter the textures themselves. Use the preview images found in the download file as reference or experiment yourself until you find a setting you are happy with. Usually it is enough to tweak the brightness or contrast of the textures. Keep in mind that our preview images usually are captured from renderers that use normal, specular and self occluding parallax mapping render techniques.
Q: Why do I get stretching and inaccuracies in my textures when I enable parallax mapping in my renderer?
A: Either you have set the height multiplier value too high or your renderer might be using some kind of "offset" parallax rendering mode, which is not as accurate as the "self occluding" variant of parallax mapping. To fix this you could try to either lowering your renderer's parallax height multiplier or blur, reduce file resolution or decrease the contrast of the corresponding heightmap.
Q: What is the difference between textures, materials and shaders?
A: Textures are maps, either in grayscale or color. Normal, specular, height, diffuse maps -they are all different types of textures.
Materials are basically groups of textures with some attributes defined. A material typically consist of either one or more diffuse, normal, specular or height map, etc. Materials can also be equipped with attributes -like: normal map intensity, specular intensity, glossiness values etc.
Materials are comparable to shaders. Shaders are small programs that are run on the graphical processing unit (GPU) which tell the renderer how the surfaces should look.
Q: What is the difference between a color map and a diffuse map?
A: A lot of artists that are experienced in the use of 3D Studio Max and\or certain real time render engines are surprised when they learn that diffusion is not actually color. It does have something to do with colour, but it is not the actual color itself. Diffusion determines the amount of color that is absorbed and reflected by a surface. It determines how much of the surface's colors we can see.
Color maps are typically color images which contain as little directional light as possible. The only light information it usually contains is ambient occlusion - which can be translated to very subtle shadows or diffuse lighting, which is why some rendering programs refer to these maps as diffuse maps.
This can be a little confusing since diffuse maps in for instance Maya refers to diffusion, while diffuse maps in 3D Studio Max refers to color maps.
Q: What is the difference between bump, normal, displacement and parallax mapping?
A: Bump maps are height information maps (height maps) that the renderer can use to "shade" the surface it is applied to. The height info is usually stored as a greyscale 8 or 16 bits per pixel image file where the low values (black) represent the low areas (valleys) and the high values (white) are used to represent the high areas (peeks).
Normal maps are also used to shade the surface it is applied to, but unlike bump maps that store height information (1D), Normal Maps store directional information (3D) instead. They are much more accurate, as rather than only simulating the pixel being away from the face along a line, they can simulate that pixel being moved at any direction, in an arbitrary way. Keep in mind that while bump maps need only 1 image channel (grayscale), normal maps are in color and require 3 image channels (RGB), which translates to 3x the memory usage. Normal maps are very hard to make by hand so they are usually generated in some way, often from height maps.
Displacement maps are also height information maps, but displacement mapping is used when you want to manipulate the actual geometry instead of the texture. In real-time 3D engines displacement mapping is typically used to generate geometry - like mountains and pits from the use of height information maps.
Parallax mapping is used to simulate displacement mapping. Like displacement mapping it use height maps to define the depth of surfaces, but instead of defining the shape of the geometry (vertex based) it defines the shape\depth of textures (pixel based). In reality there are a handful of different parallax rendering techniques, each with their respective pros and cons. The most noteworthy methods are "Offset" and "self occluding" parallaxing techniques.
You can read more about some of the different techniques here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_mapping
And here you can find more in-depth information about all these maps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_mapping
Q: What are specular and glossiness maps?
A: Specular maps define the relative strength of highlights on a surface. You can think of them as masks for telling the renderer where and how much light should be reflected in the textures. Specular maps can be either grayscale or in color. Colored specular maps are typically used when you want to fake global illumination within the texture itself and\or if you want to simulate surface transparency. If, for instance, we take a look at tree leaves, they have a tendency to shift hue towards yellow when they are lit and you could in this case make all the leaves in the specular map yellow or even red. Specularity is added to the final image, so they can only make your textures brighter.
Glossiness maps are usually used to define how dry or wet the specular highlights look. Glossiness maps are not that common in real time render engines yet as it gives pretty good results to have separate global glossiness values for each material.
Q: What are reflection/environment maps?
A: Raytracing reflections (Real time reflections) is very hardware costly, it can easily double the polygon count in a scene. That is why environment maps were invented. Environment maps are used to fake reflections on a surface by reflecting a texture rather than the actual surrounding scene. Environment maps cannot deal with moving objects and they are not as accurate as real time reflections, but their low rendering cost often make up for this. Environment maps are usually stored as cube or sphere maps.
Map examples:
Environment map format examples:
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