ingo wrote:

> Yes. (And even more if an isosurface pigments part would be added.)

We will be adding sections for special purpose or patch feature textures
including isosurface pigments. We will just have to be careful about
identifying them as such. We recognize the need to offer a resource that
will serve everyone in our community.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

Post a reply to this message

> I wonder if selected textures solicited from pov users work might be put up
> as examples?

We haven't decided how the textures will be displayed yet but we are
hoping to give the people submitting the new texture a list of possible
objects to apply it to so that it will be properly displayed to the
object type it was intended for. A good radial texture for a sphere
would look bad on a plane and we want to avoid that scenario.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

Robert J Becraft wrote:
> 
> 1.) Do you think this a useful resource in it's present form ?
> 
> Mostly.  I'd like to be able to just download a single texture rather than a
> whole set.

I agree with this. The way the current library is set up you have to download
at a minimum of one .inc file that has several other textures that you may not
be interested in. We will try to fix it so you can preview and download just
the texture that interests you.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

TonyB wrote:
> 
> >Mostly.  I'd like to be able to just download a single texture rather than
> a
> >whole set.
> 
> I wish it could work like Microsoft's ClipGallery Live, where you browse,
> select the ones you like, and then download a package of just those cliparts
> (textures in this case).

We are thinking about adding a shopping basket type arrangement to the site.
Would this interest you ?

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

Post a reply to this message

Jeff Lee wrote:

> >   As many of you know there is a POV-Ray texture library hosted at
> > povray.org ( http://texlib.povray.org )
> 
> No, I didn't know.  After for looking for a few minutes, I finally found
> it at the bottom of a page four layers deep.  Since it's hosted at the
> official POV-Ray site, why not put a link to it from the "Resources"
> page?

Do not worry about site promotion. Once we have finished redesigning it
we plan a major advertising campaign to solicit texture submissions and
to aid in public awareness of it's existence. Once we are sure everyone
has heard about it we are hoping it will take on a life of it's own.
 
> > 1.) Do you think this a useful resource in its present form ?
> 
> It's not bad.  One problem is that the "information" and "instructions"
> pages explicitly set the text to white, and provide a background image,
> but don't provide a value for the background colour -- which, if you
> browse with image-loading turned off and your browser defaults to a
> white background, makes it kind of difficult to read the pages.

We want to redesign the site so that the background is neutral and
concentrate on exhibiting the textures in the collection. There is
a seperate group working on this issue but I do not know yet what
they have come up with in this regard.
 
> Having to wade through several different pages of sky textures (for
> example) is a little annoying, though if I generally browsed with images
> enabled, it'd probably be better than waiting for all of the thumbnails
> to load.

Currently there is just too much content at the site and we are going
to work on cutting the size down to a managable level.
 
> It might be nice to have an alternate indexing method
> A keyword-search function might be helpful, too.
> Of course.  But in that case, there'd definitely need to be a more
> efficient way of indexing them

As I have mentioned in other places in this thread we will be doing a lot
to help with site navigation and texture searching. 


>  On the other hand, if there was a large selection of various media
> effects available, I'd certainly use them.  (I *still* can't figure
> out how to get media to do some of the things I used to do with halos...)

I will pass this idea on to the TAG. Media is a tricky one because it
is difficult to apply to different objects and in different lighting
conditions. What it was designed for may not work when you apply it
to your own object or scene. The catch 22 here is that media in
containers require objects and we don't want this particular library
to become an object library.


  For those who might be interested we have begun talking amongst
ourselves about adding other resources like this one to povray.org.
We have not yet decided what we will offer or even obtained permission
from the POV-Team to offer any more than the texture library but we
will be working on it after the new texture library goes on line.

Some ideas I personaly have had are:

Texture    Library
Object     Library
Macro      Library
Isosurface Library
Turorial   Library
Document   Library

  We might offer these resources from a web page that we will call the
TAG home page. Then the seperate libraries will be accessed from there.
Again we have nothing concrete on this yet and even if we do add these
it will be in stages as we get time and permission to work on them.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

Gilles Tran wrote:

> However, I think that such a resource would be extremely valuable if the
> textures were of the less-obvious kind, and of a more scene-oriented kind :
> complex textures in the lines of Jeff Lee's brick pattern or SamuelT's peeling
> paint isosurface texture, that would include the combination of normals,
> warps, pigment maps and texture maps required to do some hard stuff. This
> would make life easier for every user, from newbies who could learn from it to
> "advanced" ones who could save time. What about a "skyscraper at night"
> texture, for instance ? Or a "dirty wall with some irregular bricks showing
> beneath the cracked paint and rusty spots" texture. Or "dull texture with very
> small dents very far apart"... BTW, I find that textures are better to figure
> when in context : glass textures should be shown on bottles or glasses, wood
> textures on simple pieces of furniture, stones texture on stone-like blobs or
> bezier patches, slope_dependent textures on height-fields and so on. Just an
> idea, but I do appreciate seeing that in Bryce, for instance (at least for the
> stone and terrain textures).

I personaly agree with what you are saying and that is indeed what I think
the site should concentrate on.  How we will get people to contribute this
calibur of textures to the site remains to be seen but we can hope that
those that really know their stuff will take the time to contribute to
the collection.

Hint, hint....

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

David Wilkinson wrote:

> Each jpg page would have an associated page of textual description.

  This will be a manditory feature of the submission process. Each person
submitting a new texture to the collection must provide a breif desciption
of their texture.

P.S. I am not sure that we will offer the images available in a single
or multiple archive download. It would increase bandwidth and storage
resources that we may not have. I think viewing of textures will have
to remain an online activity but I can check into it.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

John VanSickle wrote:

> Do some publicizing to drum up interest.  If that doesn't work, then it
> probably isn't a very useful thing.

You can rest assured that by the time I am through with my publicity
campaign everyone will know about it :)

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message

Abe wrote:

> Further suggestions include:
> 
>   a. give the textures context (e.g. an instance of application).

We hope to.
 
>   b. give less emphesis to color_maps.

This is a difficult thing to do. Some textures would look like ____
if they were all neon pink :)

>   d. include media densities (e.g. cloud varieties).

The problem with media densities as I said in an earlier reply is that
they are heavily dependant on the objects they are applied to. Media
cloudscapes are really more of an object class item than a texture
class item.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !
Ken Tyler -  1200+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

Post a reply to this message

Matt Giwer wrote:

>         At most how about a single (a few?) compressed file?

You can get the contents of the current library in one zip archive.
We will likely be offering single texture downloads along with a
master archive download. It's to early in the development stages
right now to say exactly how it will be structured.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

Post a reply to this message