$12256 / $11500
I think this site needs a new way of texture management.
First there should be a guideline how to submit textures, size, format and so on and then additional maps, if there are, should be added to the same node as the diffuse texture. I don't know if it really makes sense to add normal, specular maps and so on, because they can be created pretty fast and it depends a lot on taste, but some people seem to have a use for premade versions.
An option for people who submit textures to sort them in themselves would be great, since I have seen most new commisions remain unsorted and so you cannot find them well.
Otherwise a uniform system could solve that also, I use something like a tag system in naming textures, for example ground_asphalt_dark_01_diffuse , filenames get pretty long this way, but you have a tag system, so you can find them everywhere from everywhere using search tags and names are unique.
If you have a new texture, you think of what it is in the most basic way? A "ground" texture, then what it is made of? "Asphalt", then you add a word that describes it the best, if its very dark, just use "dark", then you add a number to make it unique, i use 2 places for numbers, so 01, it is likely you have more than 10 of the same texture, but unlike to have over 100 of the same texture, maybe in a very big archive, so this could be increased to 3 numbers and after that the kind of texture, the classic texture is called "diffuse", the normal would be called "normal" and so on.
This way you could even leave them in one folder and they are perfectly sorted and you can quickly find what you need.
What do you think?
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The texture library definitely needs some more work, and you have some good thoughts.
One note from a cursory read is this: The trouble with putting too many requirements on submissions is that if you make things too difficult, people just don't submit things at all. If someone has a library of 50+ textures they want to submit, they probably aren't going to want to sit down and rename all those files. Ultimately the result is that rather than taking the time to rename them, they just don't submit the textures at all, which is the worst outcome.
Also, if you let people categorize their own things, you'll end up with categories being applied very inconsistently, or people just dumping tons of (inappropriately categorized) stuff into one category.
Anyway, it's something to think about. I'd be happy to discuss it further. :)
Could we take a wiki approach and let people label other people's submissions?
Yes that was my idea, name and categorize yourself or let others do that. Make a list of uniform tags and people can suggest tags for art that was uploaded.
Even allowing other people to do it, we'd still probably end up with inconsistent labeling. It's something to think about, though. If we could set up standards for each category and then get people to actually *read* them before they categorized stuff, it might work.