When I last reviewed a Marlin Studios product, it was a collection of interior surfaces. I commented then that interiors are difficult to visualize well, because everything must match correctly. Well, compared with the task faced by those artists working in the realms of pure fantasy, interiors must be an absolute walk in the park. True, plenty of films set a visual precedent, but if you're attempting to create this kind of aesthetic for yourself, just where do you start? You can't exactly nip down to the local spaceport and photograph a few X-Wings for reference.
Well, Marlin Studios suggests that you start with this CD-Rom based collection, modestly entitled "Amazing Sci-Fi Textures". There are 225 seamless textures, alpha maps and backgrounds, which cover mostly hulls, some alien, some damaged etc, as well as portholes, antennae and so on.
The reason for the big departure from the company's previous architecturally focused collections lies in its work for the computer game 'The Roswell Omen'. The folks at Marlin discovered a lack of any commercial sci-fi and space textures, and the idea hit them. I'm surprised nobody came up with it earlier, I mean nine out of ten people's first renderings involved spacecraft of some description.
All the textures are tileable, and like previous collections, all are delivered at three differing resolutions - 256x256, 512x512 and 1,024x1,024. Every single one of these files, no matter which resolution you choose, has an associated bump map. In addition, there's twenty background images, available in four resolutions - 800, 1,024, 1,280 and 1,600 - which are obviously not tileable as they're not meant to be.
The files are organised into twelve categories, and the filename conventions remain the same as for previous collections. This works as follows: the first four characters are a description of the texture - hull for hulls, ahul for alien hulls and edhu for extremely damaged hulls. Whilst this may not classify things as easily as carpet, marble, wood and so on did in the previous collections, it works adequately. The next two characters are numbers with the seventh character being either S, M or L, which explains the texture's size. The final character of the eight (which ensures compatibility with those still stuck in the early 90s) is left blank for textures, and a B denotes a bump map.
Again, as with previous CDs, there's a browser-based catalogue, with thumbnails of the images linked to bigger images, should you decide to want a closer look.
The fact that the textures are stored as JPEGs is no real surprise. This format is everyone's favourite for balancing file size with quality (all are saved with maximum quality setting), and has enabled Marlin Studios to cram this many textures onto the CD-Rom, with a total of 584Mb.
In terms of licensing agreements, these textures are royalty-free when used within any project (this means you can't copy them as-is and distribute them in any way). One can modify them - alter the colors, sharpness, crop them and so on - but according to the license agreement that is still a derivative work and cannot be distributed as a new texture, only used within your work.
Though hull textures abound, the patterns are actually varied enough to be used in other applications than pure 3D. The ship hull textures in particular are interesting enough in their metal plating patterns to add some depth in good old Photoshop illustration work.
Maybe now that this collection is available we'll see a few artists nostalgically dragging out that first project and replacing their space ship's early textures with these. I did, and it was almost worth the $149 just for the laugh at how clunky my particular attempt was.
