www.imagearc.com goes live on 9th October 2008

ImageARC offers both 2D and 3D artists access to a vast library of royalty free stock texture maps and reference imagery.
With 60,000+ images available and updates every month the sites content is varied and contains some truly ‘hard to find’ assets.
Images are sourced around the world from some pretty amazing locations, in addition practical objects are also scanned in studio.
All images are carefully processed, cropped, straightened and then keyworded before being uploaded to the archive.
The website features keyword and category search options as well as colour search tools that allow users to quickly find images with similar tonal values. Panoramic images can reach up to 30,000 pixels horizontally, these can be difficult to view as thumbnails or enlargements so a Zoom feature is available for these assets, allowing users to view an image at up to 25% of its full resolution.
The site also offers ‘alpha channel’ objects and textures that have all been carefully removed from their backgrounds and are on transparent layers, these are delivered in .png format, the alpha channel is embedded into the file so a separate black and white image is not required.
Users will find many similar texture types within the categories and most of these overlap so they can be painted together easily.
To access the assets artists can either Subscribe for 1,3,6 or 12 months or purchase Download credits.
Registration is free and grants users access to 10 lightboxes that they can store images in, rename and email to friends/colleagues.

www.imagearc.com