Hello! I am Jedi Mediator, a new addition to your texture community. Ready or not, here I come.
I have actually had quite a history in digital art--mostly I profess in modeling game levels ("mapping") for 3D games, an area I have become proficient in. I am also experienced in dealing with particle systems, sound mixing, and music recording/design.
But, of course, that's not why I'm here! I've come for help on textures. No, I'm not asking how to *make* them...because, in fact, I also have experience in that area as well. The only thing I need to know now is how to market my new texture pack properly. I haven't uploaded it yet due to its current state of incompletion (it's not done yet :P). Now, I'm not asking for help on *marketing*, such as it is--I want to know about pricing: what sort of cost I should put on a product to get both a good sales number and a profit (which I will probably use to *buy* other people's textures off Turbosquid anyway) to match. I have seen many, many different price ranges displayed on this site--from $50 packs of only ten textures to $150 packs of 100, and, frankly, I would like to get off to a good start on this good site with a reasonable first product.
I'm not looking to become a full-time texture artist--all I would like to do is upload a few of my creations every now and then to get them to the community and maybe make a few $ on the side.
My texture is very high-res (2048x2048), very high-quality and photorealistic, taken by a camera and edited in The GIMP, entirely seamless, and well-tileable. Below is a showcase version:
http://imageigloo.com/images/6709showcase1.jpg
Your sample image is moss or grass? It's not seamless/tileable. Even with the watermark, we should be able to tile it and test the sample image out.
Thank you for responding. I was fearing I would be another ignored newbie :P
No, that version of my GRASS texture (heh...I guess it did sort of look like moss) was not tileable--yet. I made the watermark showcase image while it was still a WIP, and that was when I was removing all the specific details to make it tile better in the end. I now have it finished and it is totally seamless and actually tiles quite nicely. I can import the same watermark into that finished version now and post it here, as well. I've improved it and I think it looks more like lumpy grass now, like it should, and less like blurry moss.
http://imageigloo.com/images/1574showcase1.jpg
MUCH better friend. Make final saleable textures, 1024x1024, jpg format. Turbo Squid provides built in watermarks at time of creation of storfront and at every upload session you make. They will work fine for you. Creating your store at TurboSquid, is one of the easiest places it can be done.
Texure artists need to create dozens of products to get minimal sales and in order to sell something, you must be top quality here. I have never sold a thing and after a year or so, took my 9 product packs down. they contained about 50 or so textures in all.
Do you have a copy of Gmax or 3DsMax? It helps to test your textures on mesh objects and renders you have made.
If you don't enjoy Gmax, I made the textures in Bryce5.5 it's a cheap way to test and render things. BRYCE: Near $100.00 US (last I checked) This image can be made into frames and animated in Bryce.
Now you're not gonna just leave it like that are you? If you love making textures or graphics, you should go for it.
Zaphad1 has 565 products up for sale. he can tell you what the turnover is like. Zaphad's textures are something you should view also, to get an idea what works.Zydroid has 2697 products.
They are active in the forums also, which makes it easier to find them if you have questions.
I have noticed that there were some texture authors that put up for sale large texture resolutions for money and small resolutions for free...is this a good marketing technique, or does it just encourage people to cheat you with the free textures you give?
I appreciate your interest in my situation. I enjoy this opportunity to communicate with others that proficiency in this area. But didn't you say that the sale rate for these online textures is extremely low? I believe you said yourself that you had a large number of textures up for sale--but never sold a single one...and if this is the case for a majority of the authors here, I am merely thinking that a newcomer probably wouldn't have much better luck.
Thank you, Eero. That is good advice. I had not considered that in the making of the texture. Also, when I said that about downloading a low-res free texture, I merely meant that they would be getting a good-quality texture for no price, even though at low-res. It was a question about marketing in sentence form--sorry about the mixup.
How's this for starters?
256x256: Free
512x512 $1.00
1024x1024 $2.00
2048x2048 $4.50
Yes, I did say that. And it's true everywhere you upload; textures sell the least. The way to make a couple 100.00 a month is to have about 200 textures uploaded.
I had about 50 textures, in 9 texture packs and they were very cartoony, so no, artists didn't want my shoddy work.
Sorry I sounded so negative Jedi.
I am sure I heard Zaphad1 mention, those 500 plus textures were bringing in meager but average monthly amount.
In otherwords, you can make some pocket money, but don't expect to make a living at it. That's if you are really good. I wasn't.
Here, have a freebie
Well, I've thought that most of my textures are pretty reliable--they're photorealistic, simply because I almost always manufacture the textures directly from photos that I took. Here's another texture I just made as an example:
http://imageigloo.com/images/4033showcase2.jpg
I think that is a good example of a seamless, at least moderately tileable (it's not perfect) dirt texture. And--it was rendered! I used the very powerful renderer program, TerraGen 2. You face the camera directly down and don't render atmosphere or shadows, it renders in about 4 minutes--even on MY computer. Then there's only the matter of de-seaming it.
Basically, I'm trying to say that I don't have very many texture resources around me! I'm not planning on flying off to England any time soon (I like medieval textures--brick, cobblestone, etc.), and I live in a tiny neighborhood with some concrete, trees, grass, and, at this time of year, snow. Do you think this TerraGen 2 texture still looks photorealistic?
P.S. Don't these forums support IMG tags? I couldn't get them to work...
NICE! I like that one. I can do that with photoshop, but not sure if it would be as good.
My thoughts are, be as original as possible and I can't afford to do the actual photography thing, so since I have this software, I try to use it for everything.
I put a product pack up, with lots of sample thumbs. check it out if you want to see some cheesy PS patterns. :)
when posting in the forum, Images must be placed in the attachment box, below the text editing pane. [IMG] tags do not work. No BBcode or html.
Photorealistic textures and mats, work for a variety of graphic design, but not all.
EXAMPLE: Barrobule the green and yellow veiny alien, will have a made up skin texture that may not look so photo real. This means, Barrobules' craft and ray gun will need to match his skin. Digital photos will stand out and look out of place.
Jedi,
Put up a freebie(upload)? One that you can afford to part with and get comfortable with how easy it is to set up a product at TS. Make the price 0.00 and let us download and rate it for you. I will write a review on it if you wish.
The dirt texture you have up: I swore it was shag carpet. Not because it's a bad texture, but because the sample is too small to recognize. Your dirt photo is exactly like my PhotoShop filters. I can re-produce it identically and without a digital camera or anything. Just start with a blank canvas and this one took about 60 seconds to make......
This confuses me...first you said that you really liked it, and then you said that it looked like shag carpet...? I thought it looked like dirt--though I can fix up a texture that is more flat and looks more solid.
My sample was 512x512, I believe--normal med-res texture size. Is that...wrong to do?
HI jedi and welcome to TS! sorry I didnt reply sooner But Ive been really ill lol never mind that.
Frendo is a good man and always helpful.
The best selling textures are really mundane things like roofs ground walls etc seamless
1024 square seems a good bet as its reasonably big but will fit in a game engine and is easy to resize.
make them 256 512 1024 2048 square etc if you can, maybe 256 is too small nowadays
You wont make huge amounts of money from them at an educated guess unless you have literally thousands of them alll good quality.
If youve got photoshop get funhouse filters tile mirror this shows your texture tiled, also useful are redfield plug ins they are free too on the web
Get as many realistic photos as you can of various things and try and get them seamless at 1024 square is prob the best advice I can give you, but feel free to try out new things and ideas, theres no set formula
save your work often with different names in a non lossy format ie TIFF so you can go back if need be.
for final publication JPG seems a good bet as its readable by just about any computer on earth and people know what they are getting, save the final jpg as max quality.
also get as many keywords as you can but dont spam, look at other vendors similiar things for ideas on keywords
Also dont make them too cheap ie less than$5 if theyre any good.
Customers filter out cheap stuff to cut out the dross
.Best of luck man.
PS the freebies are things I thought were not good enough to sell mostly, they are also an excellent attention grabber.
I also wanted to help out budding games developers etc who wanted a few decent free textures to get started.
To be able to sell textures here, I have found that having a vast collection, loads of time, and uploading new material frequently helps.
Also, don't limit yourself to just a certain type of texture. You never know what somebody might need and when. When I first started here, I posted 3 textures: a skirt, rice paper, and a bulletin board. I let those textures sit for 3 months... just to see how things went. I came back here in September to check my sales... and I had sold the bulletin board for $7.00. Ever since then I've been posting all kinds of media like crazy. I have nearly 100 items for sale now.
Keep in mind though, I'm a housewife so I have plenty of time on my hands to upload several things each week. I basically use my TS earnings as a savings account on my Paypal, for emergencies.
Also, carry a camera with you at all times. You could be anywhere and see something with great texture potential.
Hope that helped some.
Sorry to probably dissapoint you but it would be very hard to make living or even beer money selling textures. I am not sure if you loked around enough but there is abundance of textures all over the internet and for any price, from free to paid sets. Many companies like Dosch,Sub Dimension Studios or Merlin etc are selling whole sets of hundreds seamless textures. Are you competing with that?
And I don't think selling solo textures is any good idea. Absolutely not. People may buy themed sets if it is high quality but a single texture? And today is absolutely expected to have bump map and normal maps going with it.
Don't forget that people also have access to the texture generators and editors like Spiralgraphics Genetica or Mediachance Pattern Studio to mention the best. So Making seamless textures is not black art.
I just want to save you work for nothing....
Hey, I never really thought I would make $2,000 a year selling textures. Pocket change is all I really was hoping for--getting a bit of money every once in a while for doing something I love to do, digital art. I wouldn't be disappointed if I didn't make hundreds in a month, and I certainly won't devote every moment of every day to making textures! If somebody can sell a bulletin board in a 3 month span of time after contributing just 3 images, I figure I can make a bit of spare money every once in a while for contributing much more than that.
So how does one go about actually submitting a texture/set of textures? I've poked around the site a bit, but haven't figured out how to do it yet. Maybe I'm overlooking something, but could someone give me some procedure, please? :P
