ANIMAX Texture Collection
By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)



The guys from Stack!Studio in Italy, who are well know for their extremely realistic and high quality renderings, have recently released a new Texture collection of 1000+ high and medium resolution textures.

Texture Collection Options

There are currently 5 options for this collection, all containing the same content. First is the Animax website (http://www.animax.it), which currently offers all of its medium resolution textures for free download to all that visit their site. All 1000+ images can be accessed at the site, however they ask that you only download the textures you require. I can personally vouch for the high cost of Internet bandwidth, so I would urge you to follow their request. I'm not sure how much longer they will continue to offer their textures for free, but should they ever decide to discontinue that service there are still four other very good options to choose from. The second option is to receive the contents of their website offering by CD. The CD has 1,062 textures taking up 696 MB of space, this is what I have received for this review.
The third option is to receive a 60 GB harddrive pre-loaded with these textures in high resolution. (3000x2000). Option four is available to users how have fast Internet connections and a high bandwidth allowance. This option allows you to download a 710MB file from their site that contains the all 1000 medium resolution textures. I'm not sure how viable this option is for the average user, as many cable and DSL networks put caps on your monthly download bandwidth. I pretty sure that a 710MB download will get many users' accounts temporarily suspended, so be forewarned.
The last option, is to download high-res (3000x2000) textures individually. The price for all of these options, at the time this article was released, are as follows:

• Internet download of medium resolution individual textures - FREE
• Internet download of all (1000) medium resolution textures in one ZIP file -     $49US/58€
• Internet download of high resolution individual textures - $48US/56€
• CD containing all (1000) medium resolution textures - $109US/125€
• 60 GB harddrive containing all (1000) high resolution textures - $984US/1134€

Selection

As I eluded to earlier, the CD version that I received came with 1,062 textures. It is divided into 20 folders on the disk each with a naming scheme that reflects the folder names. The folder categories are divided into the following sections:

• Bricks (60) • Buildings (66) • Concrete (90) • Doors (54) • Edil (17) • Fabric (44) • Floors (23) • Marbles (71) • Metals (60) • Ornaments (59) • People (92) • Plasters (48) • Reliefs (26) • Skies (16) • Stones (82) • Tree Bark (57) • Trees (21) • Various (18) • Walls (126) • Woods (32)

The Concept

The guys at Animax have a unique marketing method for their textures. Rather than just simply offering a product, they are committing to adding new textures to the collection every time a texture, CD, or harddrive is purchased. For every $20 of product purchased, a new texture will be added to the collection. I've never seen anything quite like it, so it will be interesting to see if it works. My feeling is that as long as they offer the textures for free, they will have a tough time selling alot of product.

Quality

The overall quality of the textures found on this disk is very high, with a few exceptions. The people are fairly low resolution, with poor lighting and are somewhat grainy. The quality of the buildings is overall pretty good, but some are grainy and low resolution. For the most part these are meant for building facades being rendered in the distance rather than the foreground. The rest of the images are very well done.
Although 98% of the textures are very nice high quality textures, be aware that none of them are tileable and many will require some work to use in production.

Conclusion

The contents of this disk are very impressive. Although slanted mostly towards historic architecture and weathered buildings, I think many experienced users will find this a valuable asset to their texturing arsenal, although I would have liked to have seen, tileable textures, alpha channels with the people and trees, and less skewed images. There will be a fair bit of work required to even the lighting and tile some of these images. For the most part you will not be able to just slap these textures into your scenes without some work first.
For the price you are getting textures that have been used in production and that have been tested, but there are many other products available that are similarily priced and are tileable. It will really come down to what you are looking for and how you will be using these textures in your scene. They have a great selection, so it's worth taking a look.