Hey there, I have a ton of digital photo textures that I would like to offer free for use in 2D/3D apps. (Got a new toy, Minolta DiMAGE 404). Now I need some info, what format's best, size/resolution, probably in .sit or .zip to download. All of these have grayscale and BW to go with 'em. I just need to know the how's and why fors, to offer these. I have mineral (I'm a rockhound), vegatable, animal, and tech images. Input please...:) Zhann

Zhann,
Uncompressed BMP would offer the best image wirh no loss in color, resolution should be in the thousands 2000x2000 or better. .SIT can be uncompressed in both MAC or PC. pc requires a tool similar to stuff-it.
Looking forward to seeing your textures,

• TJ

I thought of doing this, but thinking about my own 0.1 byte per hour connection I couldn't think of how to compress them enough (even JPG @ 400K each works out quite a bit). A rockhound, eh? My great-uncle was one of those! He had this massive & amazing collection of minerals and rocks and stone age arrowheads & stuff that I used to look at when I was a kid. Most of it's in the British Museum now, but it was well impressive!

BMP gives the best quality, but a slightly compressed JPG makes the filesize much smaller. As for resolutions: higher res is better, more detail. If it renders to slow we can always downsize it manually. Rar compression takes more time but can be far more compact than .zip. I don't know if you can un-rar on a MAC though. On the PC I use the program win-rar to rar my files. Rar is sometimes up to 75% more compact than zip, but sometimes it's a bit larger too. (usually it's smaller)

hmm...let me check about the .rar files and mac. I kno stuffit will do zip on mac...

yes stufit light vers 6.5 or better does rar.

Found the site I think rarlab.com. Looks like there's
an evaluation download available.

Bear in mind that not everyone's going to pay 30 bucks U.S. just to unzip one item. Being financially challenged myself How much something costs is always on my mind

• except when me and The Kangaroo go into a bar: Kangaroo buys the first round for us both, puts down a hundred dollar bill and gets $2.98 in change. Bartender says, "We don't get many kangaroos, or for that matter giant mouses from Mars, in here".
  Kangaroo looks back at the bartender and says, "At prices like these you're not gonna get many more either!"

• TJ

I do a lot of this stuff... I use Winrar also, it does compress more effeciently than WinZip, most of the time. But, save a .jpg at 90%, and it won't matter what zipping program you use, it won't be able to compress those .jpg's much more at all. So, I suggest going with 90%(IMO). This would also be smaller than zipping up .bmp's, much smaller. Any pics that are 1024 pixels or bigger that are saved at 90%, you won't really be able to see much difference at all, if any at all, especially with textures, they are usually busy with color. 95% is also great. ;o) What do you mean by they have greyscale and BW to go with them? It would be much less downloading to just have the color maps, leave it up to the user to make their own bump maps, etc. (if that's what you meant) AgentSmith

Zhan - So happy to meet another rockhound. At the moment I'm studying for a Bsc (Hons) in natural sciences specialising in geology. What a complicated bunch of people we are in here, so many strings to each and every bow. As for the photo textures, BMP are fine by me. Making bump maps are easy. Catlin

JPG's usually get 1 KB larger when zipped with winzip, but if you use BMP's rar or zip is always welcome.

I'm with AgentSmith - just upload the colour pics (people should be able to make their own b/w maps from that), and compressed jpgs to the best of my knowledge don't really compress much anyway with any of the archivers. I'd use winzip, solely cos everyone tends to have that already on their PC.

Okay, I have winzip, they need to be able to be unzipped without anyone needing more software, just the free stuff you can get from Stuffit or WinZip. The size is 2272x1704 at superfine (print quality) on the camera. Whoops, just looked that up, it's a massive file size(12mb .tiff). Let me see if I can reach a happy medium...I definitely won't include the greyscales or the bws. I'll try a test upload, everyone can tell me how it goes. I'll post when it's uploaded...Thanks you're all so sweet to help...=> Zhann

yah .tif is like .bmp files. They are uncompressed. Open them in photoshop and do a "save fore web" optimization and save them as jpegs.

Any thoughts on gif?

Gifs are great for limited colours. I've just done a 4-page site with a number of mono GIF graphics, including one of 419x796 and one of 570x58, and the whole site is less than 35K in size. Trouble is, with more colours (i.e. 256) GIFs are normally about 2 - 4X the size of 90% JPGs, and with gradual colour changes the banding does show.

After reading tuttles post I realized I had something to say
about this from a programmers point of view - it's old news but bear with me.
My personal favorite is pcx. The compression isn't that good(RLE) but it's lossless and from a programmers point of view and simple to manipulate - somehow I've gotten out of the habit of using it in favor of bmp and jpg. bmp offers a simplified rle compression, but the compression results are not as good as pcx. Needless to say, bmp is easy to understand from a programmers point of view. jpg although it offers very high compression, is a programmers nightmare, and is lossy. I have a lot to learn about it from a programmer's as well as an artist's point of view. I would tend to believe it is best overall as long as you don't have to write a program to manipulate it. gif although easy to understand and manipulate programming wise, I think tuttle nailed it's artistic and compression shortcommings - at least from what I've read about it. My only experience with gif goes back to the good old 256 color days before Compusrve started getting all propriotory on us.

If jpg at %90 does the job, probably that's the one to use.
I'm not absolutely sure that .sit is the way to go compressionwise but it is available to all and will do.

Attached Link: http://www.stuffit.com/

Well, to give you guys .sit files, I'll need to purchase Stuffit. The free expander you get from Stuffit will not do the compression, why give it away when they're out to sell all the features, the compression option being one of them...I'll get back to you on sits. However, I can do .zips, I have them on my site for downloading backgrounds and tiles...hmmmmm....a .sit

Okay, first try, images are 1024x768, 4 in the .zip file, however, it's a hefty 847kb (not uploaded). Too big? How about a smaller image size. Also I tried my hand at a .mat file, have two nice ones but they're huge (around 15mb) how do I make them smaller? Yes, I did check the manual...:)

Wouldn't suggest making them into .mat's. Bryce takes any image you imput for textures and basically uses it uncompressed, basically turning it back into a bmp/tif. Zipping up .mat's doesn't do nearly as good as just keeping them jpg's in the first place. 4 pics at only 847kb? I think that is good, actually. Or, at least a pretty good average.

No .mats for me then, jpgs it is. Will try to upload Sunday/Monday to website, and post here when done. Need to know if anyone has problems, downloading or unzipping. BTW, I also bought Stuffit so can do .sits also, just need to know what everyone would prefer .zips or .sits...:c)

.zips Since stuffit can undo .sits or .zips, there shouldn't be a problem with mac people being left out because it's a zip file. yes/no?

I'd say you're right.

Attached Link: http://www.zhanns-place.com/za/testtexturednld.html

Worked great, downloaded in about 6 seconds, unzipped perfect. What the heck is that one called "newfoil"? It's crazy looking, lol. Thanks! AgentSmith

It's copper foil, only about 1mm thick. I use it for my assemblages, kinda like gold leaf. The designs are produced by heating the leaf then crumpling. You think that's crazy, wait till I get the rest up...:c) BTW, I use a torch to heat the foils and the designs are never the same, each one is unique. Zhann

Thanx for the textures. But the file is 800KB instead of 125 KB.

Wishful thinking Rayraz...I'll need to update the page :P

Yes, stuffit automatically defltes anything you throw at it, so no matter what program you use (winzip, winrar) stuffit will be able to open the files. No need to buy it and have separate .sit files.

Thanks Zhann, only took 3 secs to download. Must add that I really like your web site, especially the abstracts. Great work. Catlin

You guys must have the fastest internet connections, I'm on dail-up, and it takes 3mins for me to download an 847kb zip...guess, I pay for living out in the middle of nowhere...:) Although this particular part of Colorado is technology deficent in the extreme...

It took me 32 seconds to download the file. I've got an ADSL connection. I don't know if I was downloading anything else at the moment I downloaded the textures. (I've download roughly 7GB the last 1.5 weeks, so it could be that I had some other downloads running next to it). I have at least 56,8 KByte per second, and maybe even more than 80 KByte, but that s not yet certain. It fluctuates. Sometimes I have the download going at speeds of 300KByte for one second (and not at the beginning of the download) but usually it's not faster than 56 KByte/sec.

I'm on broadband 600Kb/s supposed to be but I've seen it go as low as 25Kb. Beoadband is a must if you are an internet junky like me.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for Broadband here, they say soon, but not yet. I was thinking of investing in the satellite uplink with Dishnetwork, the connection/download is suppose to be instanteous, but the price is up there at $800...maybe the internet fairy will grant me a wish, do you think...:c) Zhann

Zhann There's nothing like being optimistic, hope all your wishes come true. :) Catlin