• Maarten

  3 months ago

  The rooms look nice and could be useful as is when having 2 or 3 windows in a project, but when actually starte using these on a real world project with windows on something like on an apartment building I've bumped into many issues which this library which made me (still) having days of work just to make these libraries ready for usage in an actual real world project

  - All textures used are only available in size 3000 x 3000 pixels, which is massive when having multiple windows which only appear in medium or far away shots. Being able to choose between different texture sizes would not be too luxary
  - All textures are supplied in Multi-layer EXR format only which cannot be edited and saved in programs like Affinity Photo or Krita (also during googling I've read a lot of complaints about Photoshop users trying to edit multi format EXR too and there seems to be a bug in either Affinity Photo or these EXR's making the layers to go corrupt when saving these multi layer EXRs. Even non-multi-layer exr's would've have more stable support in photo editing software, but why even choose such a non-supported format for just simple textures?)
  - Also using multi-layer EXR makes zero sense, because only a fill and matte channel needs to be stored (so just a single layer. multi layer isn't necesary at all), which works just fine in a single PNG, which is not only showing thumbnails the OS, can be edited in all decent photo editors around for many years and is an established as a format everywhere for texturing, but is WAY smaller in filesize and processing because of lossless compression
  - Even only going from multi layer EXT to single layer PNG (just use a single layer with r, g, b channels and an alpha channel) was already a reduction of 70% file size!!! And that mades them finally editable in photo editors too without any loss in detail or color or any issues in support of the format.
  - Let alone shrinking texture size variations of smaller sizes. Going from 3000x3000 px to 512x512px (fine for windows in the back, even in medium shots) resulted in a reduction of 99,008% compared to the original exr file, that's almost 100% shrinking!!)
  - Sloppy errors in the asset library files: like the first room number uses the wrong texture group resulting in two windows using the same texture. Which took even more time to figure out. Windows are not in order in the blend files, which just feels weird and unorganized while editing these with smaller textures.

  - Not all windows are using the same aspect ratio, some are square, others are a little wider, others are even twice the width. So it's really hit or miss in your project and it shrinks the possibilities when expecting the windows to have the same size.
  - But more importantly: It uses square rectangle room textures on all these rooms, no matter the aspect ratio of the size (!) and stretches these horizontally so these textures to fit these. Making the pixels unnecesary super blurried in the x-direction on windows which are having twice the width, because the textures are now stretched only in one direction.

  - When using the asset browser version, which I do, all windows are rotated 90 degrees when projecting these on buildings in front view camera view. So each window you need to rotate after placing. Not sure if this is an issue in Blenders asset browser though. But when I asked about this to the creator the answer I got was to fix this myself with a solution which didn't even work.

  Before writing this review I've communicated all this first with the creator of course. There were some messages back and forth. The first reaction already wasn't giving a good impression though; instead of fixing an issue me as a buyer was asked to fix the issue in his library myself.

  After that some back and forth messaging happened, but although the creator said to deliver a 1k version in a newer version, which was a good step and I could appreciate, I didn't once get the feeling that my points really came across and I think I did explain pretty clear. Either the creator doesn't understand the importance of optimization and usability in real world projects, or just doesn't want to understand it. So after a few tries I had to give it up as it took me way too much time and I need to move on.

  It honestly came across as sloppy work to me, making me question several times during the process if I did make the right decision to even buy this instead of building everything myself.
  Sure, the windows look nice enough, but days later I'm still working on converting the textures to make these usable in a real world project instead of having GPU overloads etc by too many large textures. And I still need to find a way to correct all these unwanted/unnecary scaled textures.

  Let alone the bookkeeping to find ways to use all these textures on windows because they don't all have the same size/aspect.

  It might be fine for some, but please be warned and think about the above before purchasing. For me this caused a lot of frustration and extra work.

• Rob Callicotte

  4 months ago

  Love this concept and execution. Great support, too.

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