From left to right, the bumpmaps were done with: CrazyBump, Photoshop, ShaderMapPro.

I am thinking about selling this kind of thing for Vue, is there a market for photo textures ?

For me, the middle one.......

I also prefer the middle one but there are (in all of them) very distinct patterns and hard straight lines that I don't believe you could find in nature. I would recommend that you mix this with something else (some procedural noise, perhaps, or another bitmap) to remove those things.

As for market, I don't know. There are sooooo many free sources of texture maps of all kinds in the internet that, IMO, if you want to sell yours, you have to make something that really stands out from the "crowd".

Middle one as well, for the same reasons as Rutra.

They all look realistic to me.. but I can't believe anyone would be able to beat the procedural rock materials already in vue...using texture maps always eats up valuable resources. Imagine is someone had 1 million rocks in a scene all using this texture.

To be successful in the marketplace, you have to provide something not already available, that really stands out and is desirable. Since outstanding procedural rock textures are always included in every version of vue, I can't see a market for these at all, unless I'm missing something?

Actually the paterrns are found in nature because i took the picture myself :D

I fully agree with the marketing ideas, there is a lot of free resources out there indeed (;

Its kinda like selling air to people.. we already have air.

Of course, people DO buy bottled water, when water is free, so what do I know?

fully agree, and there used to be Oxygen bars in NYC, i seen one myself :P

Quote - They all look realistic to me.. but I can't believe anyone would be able to beat the procedural rock materials already in vue...using texture maps always eats up valuable resources. Imagine is someone had 1 million rocks in a scene all using this texture.

Just to comment that I'm not sure the number of rocks would make any difference - unless Vue works very differently from other 3d apps, it would load the texture into memory once, not multiple times. Also, a million rocks with a complex procedural texture might be significantly slower to render than a million rocks with a bitmap, because Vue would have to compute the procedural algorithm for each object rather than just look up a pixel value from the texture map.

I agree about the difficulty of selling rock textures to Vue users, though :-)

middle looks best to me

#1

I'm not talking about the bitmap itself, I'm talking about the recurring patterns that can be seen as a result of the wrapping of the bitmap around the rock. I signaled in the image here the main strange patterns that are very visible, like staircase effect and repeating areas.

slonishko,

I am sure you can sell your  texture as much as you want. After all high resolution quality photograph texture with bump maps, displacement maps, the whole enchilada is very hard to come by. No matter where i am on the internet I always ran into Arroway's adverticements, obvioulsy they make a lot of money. Procedural material is a joke.

If you always run into an ad of some specific vendor, perhaps you've been infected by spyware and you're receiving targetted ads. :-)

Aside from that, that texture type Arroway's material looks much better that is, you have also the advantage that your work an be distributed and rendered by anyone, Using procedural material locks you into a proprietary prison from where there is no escape.

unless you bake it out to a texture and make it tileable :)

Bitmap based materials may be good for small objects, if you make them fully tileable and if they wrap well around the object. But once you apply a bitmap based material to a large object and look at it from a distance, you immediately detect the recurring patterns, screaming "fake". It doesn't matter if they are fully tileable, your eyes detect the pattern (unless the bitmap is very homogeneous, like sand or similar, but even so sometimes it's still detectable).

So, procedural materials are no joke at all. They are extremely valuable for very large surfaces.

For me, the best combo is a mix of procedural with bitmap. The bitmap helps to sell the realism of the material and the procedural mix avoids recurring patterns.

Yup, mixing in a bit of turbulence in the effects tab works wonders on some bitmaps

the middle is the only one that passes the squint-test.
Squint and you'll see #1 is overly bright, #2 just about right & #3 too dark.
I assume all have normal map applied, if so I'd be interested to see the settings dialled way down on #1 as I think it has potential for the bump to be better than #2's.