Arroway Textures

Al Hart · 1 Jan 2010, 18:47

Seamless? Not really
Com on, use a digital camera, some practice in photoshop or gimp or any other app, that should be enough. And you can share it with your friends.

Photograph images can work very well. However, in one of our product areas - fabric for office furniture - manufacturers seems to have a very hard time creating good, illuminated and tileable patterns for use with their products through photographic techniques.

What is nice about using well thought bump maps and specular maps is that they can create images where the final result is dependent on both the view angle and the lighting angles. You can (sometimes) photograph materials with illumination and specular highlighting. But these images work best when placed in a model with similar viewing and lighting angles.

Here is an example of a an object with a "lo-res" Arroway texture with the light placed in different positions. You should be able to see subtle differences in the appearance of the texture based on the lighting. (The use of a bump map and a specular map makes it easier to see which direction the light is coming from)

I am not a particular supporter of Arroway. But I have been looking for some good bump map examples for some time and was glad to find that they existed. Some of our clients have chosen to purchase Arroway textures are we wanted to provide a good, one click way to use them. I am aware of at least 4 SketchUp rendering add-ons which support Arroway textures, (Vray, Podium, Kerkythea and IRender nXt - I'm sure there are more), so this isn't really a debate about whether they should be used or not, but an informative thread on what you can do with them.

Al Hart · 1 Jan 2010, 18:54

@gaieus said:

They are very nice textures however and my only concern is that I would need one or two from every pack only so I am not purchasing whole packs just for those few because this way they would be a bit pricy.

The have about 50 wood floor textures that can be purchased one at a time for 5 Euros each: One at a time - I wonder why they don't do this for all of them?

Gaieus · 1 Jan 2010, 19:16

Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.
Now I don't really use wood floors in my "professional" works - I'd rather see some of the stone textures being sold independently. And one or two of the tiles maybe.

dale · 1 Jan 2010, 21:18

I noticed this by the download button.

Al Hart · 4 Jan 2010, 16:57

@al hart said:

I put the question to Gerald Menzel from Arroway. Hopefully he will clarify it for us.

I got a very favorable response from Arroway:

@unknownuser said:

The information from the FAQs is out of date. Thanks for pointing me to it. I have removed it for revision. Our current policy allows for using the preview versions in commercial renderings.

Al Hart · 4 Jan 2010, 17:12

@al hart said:

I put the question to Gerald Menzel from Arroway. Hopefully he will clarify it for us.

I got a very favorable response from Arroway:

@unknownuser said:

The information from the FAQs is out of date. Thanks for pointing me to it. I have removed it for revision. Our current policy allows for using the preview versions in commercial renderings.

(I posted this a second time, because somehow the first one was posted out of order)

Gaieus · 5 Jan 2010, 05:05

Thanks Al for the heads-up. Although the preview resolution images are not very high resolution, they are indeed fine for mid and far distance shots.

notareal · 5 Jan 2010, 10:21

Good to know that they have changed the preview license to allow commercial use.

brodie · 6 Jan 2010, 15:53

I had our company purchase all of the texture packs about a year ago (I think there's been a new Wood pack since then) and I love them. Prior to that I had actually taken the time to go through nearly every page and download almost all the low res versions. I'd highly recommend picking up the packs if you have some spare coin. The resolution sizes are absolutely huge, some of them are upwards of 10,000x5,000 as I recall. I printed out the PDF catalogs and had them bound so now I just have to flip through the catalog and find the texture I want. Also I've noticed that the bump and specular maps are really well made. It's obvious that they didn't just desaturate the colored image but rather really spent some time to do them correctly.

-Brodie

Gaieus · 6 Jan 2010, 16:00

@unknownuser said:

The resolution sizes are absolutely huge, some of them are upwards of 10,000x5,000 as I recall.

That itself would already cause some render applications hard times and memory issues - but of course, choose your tool for the project.

@unknownuser said:

Also I've noticed that the bump and specular maps are really well made. It's obvious that they didn't just desaturate the colored image but rather really spent some time to do them correctly.

That's true. Certainly not some "home made" moonshine.

Al Hart · 6 Jan 2010, 16:16

@gaieus said:

@unknownuser said:

The resolution sizes are absolutely huge, some of them are upwards of 10,000x5,000 as I recall.

That itself would already cause some render applications hard times and memory issues - but of course, choose your tool for the project.

We are including an automatic resampling to a width of 1K, 2K, etc. as we create SketchUp and rendering materials from the Arroway textures. We had to do that for our other products since SketchUp users often grab really high-resolution images and place them into models. They look ok for SketchUp, but can really mess up other things like rendering and 3D PDF. (which has to include these huge images in their own 3D model)

That way the user can easily choose a lower resolution if he/she wants to speed things up a bit.

brodie · 6 Jan 2010, 20:13

@al hart said:

We are including an automatic resampling to a width of 1K, 2K, etc. as we create SketchUp and rendering materials from the Arroway textures. We had to do that for our other products since SketchUp users often grab really high-resolution images and place them into models. They look ok for SketchUp, but can really mess up other things like rendering and 3D PDF. (which has to include these huge images in their own 3D model)

That way the user can easily choose a lower resolution if he/she wants to speed things up a bit.

Quite true. Sketchup storing the whole image file can be a problem. I just did a quick look and found an arroway texture that's 8,000x8,000 at a whopping 131mb (not the norm, but most of the diffuse maps tend to be in the 30mb range). Doesn't take many of those to slow down your save times considerably. However for me if I'm going to use the full scale image in my final texture I can't reduce the pixel size to 1 or 2k as it messes up the UV's when I export to Maxwell (I'm not sure how other render apps handle this). My solution is to open the file in Photoshop File -> Save for Web/Devices. I set it to JPG with a compression quality of 01. So I maintain the dimensions but the file becomes MUCH smaller. I use that smaller texture in SU and link it to my Maxwell material which uses the full scale version and the UV comes out perfect. Incidently I have to do that whenever I use a texture so if anyone knows of a program I might use to do that in a batch process I'd be interested. Maybe I could do that in PS, but I haven't taken the time to figure it out.

Another thing I should mention w/ the textures that I didn't know before I purchased them is that they all come in .png format. I, personally, think that .png's are the best thing since sliced bread but there are those who disagree.

-Brodie

brodie · 6 Jan 2010, 20:31

@gaieus said:

That itself would already cause some render applications hard times and memory issues - but of course, choose your tool for the project.

That's probably true, not to mention that more often than not the resolutions will be overkill for most projects. I'm personally willing to take the memory hit though on account of the sample sizes being so large. For Arch-Viz I always find that 95% of the textures out there have too small of a sample size for my taste. Might be ok for interiors but exteriors are a different beast.

On the negative side I would like to see some more clean textures. Many of their wall textures (plaster, brick, concrete etc.) have a well worn look about them which may be great for some people but typically for Arch-Viz you want to show the building as it would be new, not 10 years down the road.

-Brodie

Gaieus · 6 Jan 2010, 20:39

To me, it's the contrary - as I build archaeological reconstructions. And although you exactly know those buildings used to be new once, you somehow expect them to be worn.

brodie · 6 Jan 2010, 21:34

I suppose variety is the spice of life.

-Brodie