Hello Spencer,
Welcome to the forum! And thank you for the suggestions.
File Size
I understand downloading files without knowing the size can be frustrating at times. Since the files are zipped at the same time they are downloaded, it’s impossible for the server to know what the final size is going to be. There’s a way to estimate the size of the zip file, it’s just not 100% accurate and Chrome complains about it. So, what we are going to do is showing the estimated file size in a corner of the asset download screen that will update in real-time while you change your download settings (we can also show the estimated download time). I know this is not a perfect solution but at least it will provide more information until we find a better alternative. This is something we had already scheduled for the next update during next week.
FSI File Format
The FSI file format stands for Friendly Shade Image. It was made to overcome the resolution and file size limitations other image file formats have. FSI can be read by most Friendly Shade tools.
The main tool for manipulating FSI images is called Texel (it can be downloaded from here). In a common case scenario like creating a 3d scene using our materials, what you usually want to do is using lower resolution texture maps for the farthest materials and high resolution or crops for the most important ones. This is also true for close-ups, we often just use a 4k to 16k crop of the material, specially when rendering with GPU, which usually has a very limited amount of memory.
Another approach is using UDIMs which is what we usually do at Friendly Shade for our own rendering process. This lets you break the whole material into tiles and even export them in different resolutions. This way you don’t have to worry about crops as you can use the same files for close-ups and wide shots in a clever way. Sebastian is recording a video about the whole process using Texel. It should be ready before the weekend.
Our render engine is still in development so, there’s no ETA for the first alpha yet.
Pre-made Materials
This is a great idea. We used to provide materials for most popular render engines in our past products. However, the way we usually accomplished this was by creating all materials manually, asset by asset, engine by engine. While this is a good way of making sure every material looks good, it’s a huge challenge when it comes to hundreds of materials and models which is what we got this time. So, we are looking into a way of automating the process and getting the same results in a more reasonable time frame.
There’s a “bridge” tool we plan to develop for downloading, managing and using our assets in all the different 3d packages and render engines. This task looks like a good fit for this program. We’ll post more about this in a dedicated thread in the future.
Let me know if you have any questions. 
