When CGTextures threatens to take down Blendswap, I call that being a prick. I have no issue with them protecting their copyright, I have issues with an inconsistent licensing. The Durian project itself may be at risk.
Mostly, I have issues with needing to retexture a dozen models if I wanted to share them. Which maybe, only six people care about.
But you six, I care about you!
I totally agree with you. I don’t know what gives with CGTextures now, but if they are giving the textures out for free for anyone to use, it’s not fair that they restrict your use of them if you want to use them for CC purposes. Especially when I can take and use the same textures and package it with my model and sell it on a site like Turbosquid.
Andrew – CGTextures is doing a great disservice to the 3D Community. They are not “protecting” their intellectual property by restricting the use of their textures where the CC license are concerned.
If you’d actually read through the CC licenses then you’d realize they are being pricks and hurting the 3D community. More so, they are hurting themselves.
From now on I am going just make my own textures.
Well that’s where the Blender community has it backwards…
The world does not need to conform to fit our CC standards. We need to conform to fit the world (if you wish to use their work).
Releasing something under Creative Commons is a gift, not an entitlement.
PS. A lot of the source files on Blender Guru have textures packed inside them. I always thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but since CGTextures aren’t happy about it I’ll soon have to go through and remove them one by one. It’s a pain, but it’s my own fault for not doing the research beforehand 
Well, I had no problems with CGTextures licensing the way they do, and their reasons are theirs and only for me to respect. With that, I agree with Andrew, there’s nothing wrong with CGTextures, you just need to be very aware of what you intend to do with your models before deciding to use them. I too had 13 models removed, but I did so gladly, I don’t intend to do any wrong to someone, I want to be legit for the community.
The point brought up with Durian though is a very good question, perhaps the Durian team can speak to all the models and where the textures came from. I’m sure lots of it was hand painted, but I doubt given the complexity of the project that the entire project could have been done so. Perhaps they know of some good resources that we don’t?
As the guy who did a large portion of the texturing for Durian, we are fine with all this. It wasn’t new news to me when I started the project so we kept on top of it. During the community sprints, I also did my best to keep on top of it and remind those in IRC and the blog not to use textures that were not compliant with Creative Commons, checking site licenses and so on. If I missed something, it certainly wasn’t from a lack of trying.
This isn’t limited to the resources from CGTextures. They seem to be singled out here for some unknown reason rather than being a general example.
One resource that did prove quite useful on top of compatible community texture donations and simply walking around and taking photos was the website http://www.everystockphoto.com/
The site searches through a collection of stock photo resource sites. The handy part is under advanced search where you can specify which license(s), including various creative commons, you want to search by.
I have to say this was one of the most frustrating and restrictive aspects of Durian from an art point of view, but that was because as a team we were deliberately sticking to creative commons only, for rather obvious reasons. It was certainly not the fault of websites like CGTextures. I personally have no problems with their licensing and it’s great they do what they do for artists in general.
Incidentally, I plan to do some further research into 3d.sk image useage for texture creation. I’ve had a quick look through the licenses on their site, but will probably contact them directly to be sure.
Tedious as it can be, it’s a solid habit to get into checking this stuff out regularly as digital artists.
Blend on!
While I would generally agree with the push to see more websites distribute free texture libraries under less restrictive licenses such as Creative Commons, it is technically not an ethics violation for CGTextures to not allow their work to be used in any open source projects despite it being a major inconvenience for people short on textures, providing that they have the license in an easy to access page.
If you have Windows, you can just grab the free MapZone software and use that to make your textures with or without images made by your favorite paint program as a base. While the maximum size you can do is 2048x2048 pixels, it is big enough for most cases and you can recreate about any of the surfaces seen on the CGTextures website (and then surfaces that would either be impossible or too dangerous to take a photo of)
I just peeked into their legal statement:
3. Proprietary Rights
You acknowledge and agree that Goodtextures may contain proprietary and confidential information including trademarks, service marks and patents protected by intellectual property laws and international intellectual property treaties. Our content may not be sold, reproduced, or distributed without our written permission. Any third-party trademarks, service marks and logos are the property of their respective owners. Any further rights not specifically granted herein are reserved.
Hmmm
And this one adds to my confusion:
AboutGoodtextures is a stock texture site that provides artists from around the globe with a large range of textures. Here you can explore thousands of different images, or just find that perfect little texture for your Photoshop project. All the textures listed on this site are absolutely free to download and can be used for your private and or commercial projects.
Hmmmm
I can download the textures for free . It doesn’t state that you can use them without any restrictions.
But as mentionned earlier, in their faq they have
May I use these textures in my Open Source (Creative Commons, GPL, etc) project?
Yes. These textures may be used in Open-Source projects. In that case, you are allowed to bundle them and distribute them as a package. Please add the following text to the documentation of the map:“One or more textures on this map have been created with images from Goodtextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default. Please visit www.goodtextures.com for more information.”
That seems to allow you to upload your model to blendswap with a texture from their website packed with it when releasing your model under a CC license, as long as you have the crediting part coming along your .blend
At times like these, we should all get a Wacom and just paint our own textures.
Yeah but with the whole iHate ordeal we have learned that for some licenses adding extra requirements renders its incompatible with some of those licenses.
Peace of mind requires:
1 - a 100/150$ compact digital camera (probably you already have it, no need for 100’s or 1000’s of $ camera for this purpose);
2 - a raster graphics program (like GIMP);
3 - a specialized texture program like Genetica or FilterForge (probably there are OSS alternatives, I did not investigate).
Shot your own pictures of materials, process them by yourselves and build your own material library; keep intermediate files to document your work.
B.t.w., texture making is a fascinating hobby by itself.
@Ben Dansie: Thanks for the reply, I can about imagine how un-fun that was!
My understanding as was explained to me when I queried GoodTextures.com for clarification is that by default the textures can not be redistributed. This means they don’t want their site cloned, they want to be the central repository. They do want their textures to be available to those outside of commercial works, so bundling the texture with the model under CC is acceptable so long as you provide the link. I believe the mentality is that people won’t download the model for the texture, but follow the link back to the original stock.
As I have stated elsewhere, I encourage anyone with concerns and questions to simply contact [email protected] and ask. As Ben Dansie has stated, it’s best as digital artists to start getting in the habit of having some dialog for our own knowledge. Please, ask GoodTextures and I would encourage you to share their response with us.
@Quandtum - No worries. And I did consider painting all my textures from scratch, ie blank gimp canvas. But I still lack a lot of the speed and raw painting skills to pull that off on that sort of scale.
Wow, didn’t know we would open such a can of worms with this. First I want to state.
CGTEXTURES.COM IS NOT TRYING TO SHUTDOWN BLENDSWAP.COM. PERIOD.
They have been very accommodating to use about the use of their models on Blendswap.com. They did not contact us and condemn us of anything, I contacted them to get help in clarifying their licensing. Upon doing so Marcel was very polite in helping me understand his licensing, and I have no ill feelings towards him.
We as artist’s have to be more responsible in understanding what we use and to what extent we can use these things. Just cause it’s free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it. We have to be considerate and read other artist licensing info. It’s our responsibility as artist, and I know that the Open source community has a tendency to look down at others who don’t comply with or Agree with OS. But we need to stop that.
I think CGTextures.com is a great community and website. I urge all of you to continue to use them. Just make sure they are not used on any model you want to upload to Blendswap.com Again, I wish Marcel and CGTextures all the luck I can and really didn’t want this incident to turn into what it has.
As a side note we at blendswap are looking into creating a texture swaping site based on blendswap that would deal only with CC-0 textures, to fill the gap that I think the texture sites have now. Hopefully we will have more information on this in the coming weeks. In the mean time if you want to use textures for blendswap use http://www.goodtextures.com/
Quandtum, has contacted the owner of this site and he is more than willing to allow our users to use his textures for our purpose.
Again, I want to state that on our end we have no ill will toward CGTextures.com or any other artist that has a different opinion on how they use their licensing for what they create. They are not trying to shut us down, and they are most defiantly not being Pricks. So please stop the flaming of their site, it is a great resource for all 3D artists. You just can’t use it with Blendswap.com
I hope this helps clear up this matter and doesn’t stir the pot even more, that is not it’s intention.
matthew/mofx
Blendswap.com Owner
Well put Matthew.
I think the issue you do not see here is the problem with the complicated licensing.
What is in a bigger picture the point of free when you cannot use it for your 3D work and upload it as well?
I agree this is not a CGTexture behavior - much more a content license issue users complain about here.
If CGTexture would allow using the texture on a model, but require to provide d/l links to the website
for the original texture, perfect. But not to allow this even with a texture one would has adjusted and painted on it seems not to fit logic.
Indeed, well put Matthew.
I wasn’t aware of this program, it’s very nice… I still wonder though why such a powerful program is free and is what it produces really able to be CC’d or are there restrictions there as well? I haven’t gone through the legal jargon on it (yet), as I am still weary, I still question it now. If there is indeed no restrictions, creating an open database of saved files would yield better quality textures then photo DB (and less storage intensive and globs of “amature” photos).
I dunno, with all this open source stuff and all this CC stuff on the internet, why is this one piece (photo textures) such a challenge?
I have to agree with Andrew. Let’s all stop fussing about this. CGTextures is a business, not a charitable organization. They have to protect their work. Look at it this way - the money that guy/girl makes from clicks to his ads is his/her motivation. Teenagers on this forum tend to forget that sometimes. No offense, but really. Get out there and work for a living, and then see how much spare time you have to create a massive database of textures, which you simply give away, with no restrictions whatsoever. You probably complain about the ads on the site as well.
Solution: Everyone complaining, go make a no restrictions texture site: Spend years building it up, and ask nothing in return. Sounds fun, doesn’t it.
Stop whining.
It would have been nice if that had been directed… some of us here are having a constructive conversation at ensuring copyrights are respected yet still able to continue our work under CC.