Thank you for purchasing Ransom Interactive's Stressed Floor & Ground Textures, Volume 1.
This collection includes 15 seamless stressed, aged, and stained floor and ground textures for use in any 3D program. These textures are all seamless, infinitely tileable textures developed with multimedia, video, and print professionals in mind. Each texture is developed out of Ransom Interactive's unique photo and art resource library by our 3D and multimedia team, integrating imagery from all over the world. Textures are license and royalty free for registered users, but may not be distributed as part of any other collection. Please refer to the license included this collection for additional information regarding rights and limitations.
For those of you who purchased the Strata textures, we apologize for the big download. Strata is looking at support JPEG data inside their textures and, when they do, this should make future collections much more compact.
The General Usage Texture Collection.
The general textures (separate color and bump files for manual importation) have been named using the standard 8-character DOS convention, to ensure the greatest degree of compatibility with the widest number of naming conventions. Each texture has a standard Photoshop¬ preview attached, so if your 3D or DTP program supports previewing in the open and save dialogs, it's a great way to browse the files when you're looking for a particular texture.
For your convenience, refer to the key below for a description, or point your browser to:
BAREGRND ╨ A texture of ground and dirt. Great for dirt floors, desert mountains, bare hills, canyon valleys.
BROKTILE ╨ Broken, Stressed Tiles. A school cafeteria-style tile that's been cracked, scuffed, and broken. Great for abandoned building floors, bombed-out office buildings, etc.
BTHRMTL ╨ Broken, stressed octagonal bathroom tile. Great for that dirty subway bathroom or the bathroom in that haunted house.
BTHTILE2 ╨ More broken, stressed octagonal tile. Excellent for adding variety to your broken, bathroom surface.
CASTLFLR ╨ Stone castle floor. Great for the floor of your favorite dungeon, or for the floors and walls of a foreboding castle.
CEMNTFLR ╨ A pocked, worn cement floor. Great for the basement floor or the old retaining wall.
CRKDCMNT ╨ A cracked cement floor. Great for that floor in the wine cellar.
CRKDSFLR ╨ A cracked stone floor. Great for that castle floor or the floor of that old tunnel under the street.
DARKGRVL ╨ Dark gravel (also works well as asphalt). Great for a road, street, or use as a dark stone. Also pretty good gravel.
GARAGEFL ╨ Oil-stained garage floor. Great for garage floors or gas station parking lots, or any good place for a stained, discolored cement surface.
GRAVEL ╨ White gravel. Great for╨ta da!╨gravel. Gravel roads, gravel pits╨you male the call!
GRNDGRSS ╨ Ground and dead grass.
HVWRNCON ╨ Heavily worn concrete.
REDMRBL ╨ Old red marble tile. Great for the lobby of an old opera house, or the master bathroom of a grand old house.
SCFDCONC ╨ Light scuffed concrete. A great concrete texture for when light wear is the order of the day.
SCFDTILE ╨ Heavily scuffed tile. Like the broken cafeteria-style tile, but much more heavily damaged, virtually unreconizable. Great for any scene of destruction.
STNTILE ╨ Angular Stone Tile. Great for any old stone floor or walkway.
WAVYGRAS ╨╩Wavy green grass. Great for the green backyard or for the lush street median. Not exactly stressed, but a useful ground texture to have in your collection.
How to Use:
Strata Studio Pro 2.x
In StudioPro (if you downloaded the Strata Specific collection) you just drop them into your textures folder, in your libraries folder, in your Strata application folder. If you are using Strata but purchased the general library because of download or general compatibility considerations, then you are ready to go. Just create a new surface texture, hit the load button, and navigate to find the appropriate color and bump map files that you desire. Strata recognizes the JPEG format without problem (even though the resulting compression does not persist in your model file, alas).
All Other 3D Applications
While the process is different for every program, if you have already done a mapped texture at some point in time in your 3D program, then you know how to use these textures. Just import the bump map file into the bump map channel/option of your application (possibly referred to as surface deformation) and import the color map into the channel/option referred to as color map or "diffuse color".
In Programs that Don't Support JPEG
These files are JPEG files╨a lossy compression format that is virtually universal, making these textures usable on every single platform on the planet. Most 3D programs worth their salt will accept JPEG files these days, but if yours doesn't for some goofy reason, there are plenty of shareware programs to convert from JPEG to some other format. Most image editors (Adobe Photoshop¬, for example) will also convert them very easily.
In Desktop Publishing/the Web
For the most part, in DTP and on the Web, the bump maps that we labored so hard to create won't do you much good (there is a Bump map plug-in for Adobe Photoshop¬, but that's about it). However, the color maps are fine, and for DTP, the high-resolution nature of our high-quality textures can come in quite handy. Many of the brick and stone textures will not show off text placed over them well, however, without some adjustment, as the intended target is high-end 3D animations and modeling. Also, they are large textures, which is fine for background in DTP (and if you need the texture bigger, just increase your canvas size and then copy and paste to tile your texture; if you butt them up right together, they will join seamless, for as many times as you card to do it) but not so good for the Web. If you want to use one of these textures a background on a Web page, take it into a 3rd party image editor and reduce the size: we recommend by 75% or thereabouts.
Rendering Speed/Memory Concerns.
To improve rendering speed: These textures are intended for multimedia developers doing high-quality video and print; thus most of the textures are larger than Strata's recommended 256x256 size (and this advice applies to almost all 3D applications), many of them much larger. To reduce memory requirement and rendering speed, you may wish to reduce the size of the textures in Adobe Photoshop¬ or another image editing program before importing (or, for owners of the Strata collection, by cutting out, changing the size, and repasting back in; this may require re-adjusting your texture placement).
Thanks to Strata for making the program all these textures were originally developed for, Software Unboxed for giving us a way to get our product out to market, and everybody at Ransom Interactive¬ for doing such a great job on these super cool textures.
