Cheap textures: all textures on sale, get em’ while they’re hot!

We’re having our first ever texture sale over at NetRender. Every texture package is 35% off, but this is a limited time offer. In the middle of March prices are back to normal.

Once the sale is over  we’ll be adding some new texture packages and it will be time for us to get outdoors once again to take photos.  We’re expanding our number of tree textures, flower textures, and palm textures.

John has also been working on his website. Many of the renderings in his portfolio section use NetRender textures, so head over there to checkout his work if you get the chance.

New and Improved Texture Downloading

We just upgraded out website’s file downloading functionality. The new download function supports pause/resume as well as multiple connection downloads (like many download manager use).

We serve up a lot of big files and this new download functionality should really improve speed and reliability for our customers. This latest upgrade is one of the last technological hurdles left for perfecting the backend of our site.

Now we can focus on some of the remaining little things. Like getting our new textures packages from this past summer posted online, as well as tweaking our site and improving the UI.

Until next time…

Great Texture Summer!

We hope everyone out there is having a great summer!

Things are good here at NetRender: we have new textures to add to our existing packages, we also have some big improvements coming in the descriptions of our textures.

That’s about all the news for now

Improving the checkout process

This weekend we may some significant improvements to our checkout process.

Specifically, we had been having some problems with our email server (hosted by Google) not immediately sending out purchase receipts. That has been fixed now.

We also streamlined the order confirmation messages themselves, making our texture product download links more prominently displayed (so once a customer purchases, it is easier for them to download their purchased products).

The final improvements were to our texture map descriptions, especially our Trees Vol 1 texture package.

Last month was our best month ever for sales and I hope that some of these new enhancements will make our site even more useful for our customers

Improving our SSL (https pages)

Credit card security and safety is a top priority to many online shoppers. At NetRender we value our customers privacy and try to protect their data as much as possible.

We use a SSL certificate from GeoTrust and our credit card processing is done via Authorize.net, both of which are top companies in their respective industries. We also never store customer credit card information on our servers.

However, some of the non-critical content (mainly images) on our shopping cart pages has been served without SSL encryption. That meant that we weren’t getting the full gold “lock” displayed by internet explorer in the address bar, or the lock in the status bar of FireFox. Those icons signify a secure site.

Yesterday I improved our shopping cart code to make sure ALL content server on a https page was encrypted. Now we have a full secure “lock” displayed on all of our secure pages.

Though texture product pages can be viewed through a non-secure connection, once a customer is ready to checkout ALL credit card information submitted to our shopping cart is automatically encrypted.

We also now display the GeoTrust logo on our pages (here’s a sample Tree Texture Maps Page) and clicking on that logo will open a page where our customers can check the current status of our GeoTrust certificate.

I enjoy tweaking and improving our site, we are getting close to having all our “wish list” features implemented

New Sample Renderings

Today we received a wonderful new sample rendering from one our texture users. The primary textures used in the image are: some new (beta) palm trees textures and our tropicals (with palms) texture package.

We’re looking forward to adding more user submitted samples in the future

New Texture Package- Architectural Elements

Yesterday, JD and I, well mostly JD, uploaded a new Texture Package to NetRender.com This new package is the long awaited Architectural Elements texture package. This was made from my personal library of materials, which took me more than 5 years to put together. It contains over 160 original textures from brick, counter materials, fabric, wood, flooring, stone, and many more.  Textures, where applicable, are tileable, and seamless. All textures are high res, have either been taken with my Canon 5d or materials we have scanned in. Great for any architect or illustrator’s library. I personally use all of these textures for my renderings, which you may see my portfolio here.

 

Improved Help Pages / Spring is in the Air

Today we revised our help pages. Previously the main help page was rather sparse, now we fleshed it out a bit and things are looking better.

We are also working on some new texture map packages and new additions to our Tree texture package and our Tropical (palm tree) texture package.

Later this month we’ll be introducing our first Architectural Elements texture package. This package will include materials for realistically texturing buildings.

Since Spring is in the air, we’re looking forward to plenty of new flower textures and even some new shrubs/grasses It’s an exciting time of year!

North American and European Tree Textures

Our most popular product is “Trees Vol 1″. This collection of high-res North American and European tree texture maps also includes alpha channels and transparency maps. These tree textures are meant to add a realistic and natural touch to architectural renderings or any 3D modeling project (video games, modeling, etc.)

The tree textures package features the highest resolution images in the industry. And all the tree images are in lossless TIFF format with integrated transparency maps, as well and a separate TIFF alpha channel (in case your application doesn’t support transparency in TIFF images).

This library currently contains 57 tree textures totaling 575MB, and 32MB in matching alpha channels. However, we routinely add new images until we reach 150-200 textures.

If you have a request for specific tree texture, please let us know!

Tropical Textures and Palm Trees

New Textures

We now have our tropical textures and palm trees texture package available for purchase.

Some new textures from Mexico will be posted in the coming months.

Full-Resolution Sample Textures

We also have some (watermarked) full resolution sample textures available for download.