The NetRender company weblog

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

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

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!

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!

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.

We just posted some new sample renderings that use our textures

Sample 1 ( + 5 more)

We’ve improved our frontpage and our contact page.

The frontpage used to say in the red section “Welcome to NetRender”. Now we highlight some of our policies and texture features.

The contact page didn’t have an online contact form before, now it does. The delay was caused by using Google for our email hosting, it took some custom coding to get everything working correctly.

Our tropical textures package is coming along nicely, it will have at least 30 hi-res textures from Hawaii.

Today we decreased the amount of time required for credit card authorization on our site.  Specifically, what was taking 30+ seconds before is now down to 14 seconds or less. This is a much needed improvement to our shopping cart.

We also posted our product satisfaction guarantee.

John also sent me some nice sample renderings that feature our textures. They will probably be posted later this week or next.

PS In March I’ll be visiting Mexico for more texture map reconnaissance. In May I’ll be headed to Europe. And finally in the summer it will be Colorado and California.

I am currently in Hawaii taking photos for our new Tropical Textures Pack Volume I.

The weather here has been good for plant photography, if a bit too sunny (overcast days would provide less harsh lighting). To compensate, I’ve been trying to take images in the morning/evening and anytime it is cloudy.

So far there are about 50-60keepers from the trip so far. I hope to get another 10-25 before I leave on th 19th.