Happy 2011

We hope you have a happy and prosperous 2011 🙂

This year we’ll be launching a new Premium Palm Tree Textures package, look for it soon!

50% off sale, this week only!

We’re running a 50% off sale this week. All textures are half off.

Have a great week!

Upcoming: Hawaii Photos and Textures

We already have a tropical texture package featuring many images from Hawaii. However, in the coming weeks we’re adding some new free textures via our blog. Let us know if you have any specific textures requests :-).

Stay posted and have a very happy holiday season!

Free Textures Sunday: Outdoors

We have plenty of high quality textures available for low prices at NetRender.com. However, we are now adding some FREE textures for your downloading pleasure.

We hope these textures will be helpful to you:

(to see the full size version: click the image, then wait for the page to load and click the photo again for the full size 12MP image)

Pealing white paint on wood

Wooden planks/board texture photo

Tiny plants, almost like grass, photo/texture

White and orange cat animal hair texture

Learn about Tree Textures

What are Tree Textures?

What are Tree Textures? Tree textures are images of trees used for computer modeling. The tree images have the background removed so that the trees can be seamlessly integrated into renderings. The renderings can be for architects (houses, landscaping, commercial development) or for game designers (trees for racing games, FPS games, strategy games, etc.).

What makes a good tree texture?

Why are our tree textures good? To begin with, they start out as high quality digital photographs. These photos are taken with DSLRs using appropriate settings and good glass (lenses). The next step is to postprocess the image and make sure it is up to our quality standards. Finally, we remove the background from the image. This last step is one of the most important because it insures that our images will work will Photoshop, Autodesk 3ds Max, FormZ or any other program that supports TIFF image transparency. Our images are “plug and play” or “drag and drop” because they don’t require tweaking to remove fringing etc. This can save untold hours of work during the lifespan of a modeling project.

Questions?

Please post in the comments and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

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 🙂