How to make/find textures & materials that are legal for sale?

pureheartspassionarts

We have been in the community for some time, but only recently have begun to explore the possibility of publishing some of our own creations, with easier/lower quality ones as freebies and more complex ones as purchasable. However, we are uncertain about one specific factor:

How exactly does one acquire textures and materials for said products in a way that can be legally sold as part of the product?

The difficulty is, making unique textures for each and every item can be extremely taxing if one is limited to freeware (as we are, given our current budget), and purchasing textures is not easy for the same reason. Therefore, we jsus want to get a few rules straight on the use of royalty-free stock images, and perhaps some suggestions on how to make our own textures more easily without the use of Photoshop or other programs that require monthly fees. So here are our questions:

 

If we were to turn a royalty-free image into a seamless texture, is that legal or illegal for redistribution, as it is not the original texture?

Are there any options in Daz or in other programs to make it easier to make skins for character models? We mainly alter preexisting skins, but generally the changes are not nearly enough to permit redistribution, and whenever we try to make our own skins, there is always a discernable seam along the areas where the textures meet, especially if one is using pasted textures like fur or patterns. Are there any programs/tutorials to help in creating these skins and preventing issues with seams and such? It would be very helpful if we could make our own skins.

To what level must a texture be altered to be legally redistributable? For example, if we were to use the eyebrows from a preexisting face skin, what is the legality of that, so long as it doesn't have the full original texture? And if it is illegal, how and where exactly do the people who make skins legally acqire the textures they use?

Making every texture yourself for a model is very time-consuming. Is there any legal way of acquireing textures that we can use freely to speed up the process?

 

We know these may sound a bit obvious, but we're very rusty on things like legality, as all of our previous creations have been solely for personal use. Thank you for any advice you have!

Richard Haseltine

It is, I'm afraid, a myth that some level of change allows a texture or other content to be redistributed. It is not possible to modify a texture or other resource to create textures for a product or freebie unless the license terms of the resource explicitly allow it (and generally merchant resoruce sets cannot be used for freebies). Still, freebies cannot necessarily be expected to include textures so you could simply point to a product used in your preview images and leave it up to the users whether to apply that (if they have it) or to use something else.

Royalty free is not the same as open source - it just means that there are no additional license fees for using it in accordance with its license. You would need to check the terms of its liense to see if using it for texturing a set that was to be shared or sold was allowed - if the license does not explicitly allow such use then it cannot be used.