By Ian Hollidae, 2025/11/19

This is the concrete pavement of a large covered sitting area at a nearby park. There were plenty of colored sections to choose from (green, blue, etc) but the red sections stood out. I can certainly see this texture being used for floors, walls, and maybe, vases.

Interestingly, after I shot this, I learned that the colored fragments were glass. I had always assumed they were rock. If that's true, I guess it's one of the many things you discover while researching your subject.

Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

Download the Sprinked Colors texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/09/23

This is a flat concrete wall captured in low light. There are plenty of interesting patterns and imperfections scattered throughout the original shot. One subtle detail I left in the crop is there seems to be a slight brushed area near the center of the image. Not sure if that was intentional or if the builders even cared. I'm thinking this texture will be used as a standard wall or a floor for future 3D presentations. I don't see a wider use but you never know.

Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

Download the A Splash Of Concrete texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/07/30

I've been finding a lot of decorative rocks as of late. But unlike the last one i posted, which had a more chiseled surface, I found the random "veins" interesting. The cloudy conditions also muted the colors somewhat, eliminating all the bright spots and small shadows.

Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

Download the Drizzled texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/05/02

Like so many of the textures I've captured to this point, this is one I found walking down a street. It's a large decorative boulder, just over a foot in height, used in landscaping. Unfortunately, there's no look-up-rock feature in Apple Photos so I'm not sure what type of stone this is. But the chiseled/weathered sides and various colors looked interesting.

Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

Download the Stones Throw texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/02/18

Throughout my texturing project, I've been able to capture a decent number of textures. Most have come from places I expected such as floor and wall tiles, facades and natural settings. In this case, I found a texture in an unlikely spot: a vending machine. It wasn't something that stood out or overwhelmed your senses. It was the subtleness that drew me to it.

The upper left thumbnail is the original photo. Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

I was somewhat surprised to capture anything in this particular case. The machine was outside during the day and sitting on a white concrete sidewalk. Fortunately, it was located under a large canopy but it was still quite bright. I was able to find a small area that was workable (low reflective light, no highlights). However, I couldn't quite tell if there was a backlight turned on inside the machine. During editing, it appears there was one but it made little difference. It may have even added something to the overall capture.

Download the Plastic Shock texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/01/27

This is a wall facade taken at an office building lobby. The tiles had a marble-like pattern that didn't have a reflection so I decided this might make a pretty good texture.

Since photo textures rarely get used without some post-processing, simple coloring seemed like a good idea for this particular image. It also adds to the reusability of the image.

The upper left thumbnail is the original photo. Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

So far this texture has only been used in the Tour Of Shapes project but I can see several other uses for the original photo in the future. Whether I stick with coloring or try something new remains to be seen.

Download the Marble-ish texture set under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Ian Hollidae, 2025/01/27

A while back I wrote a post, Shooting for Textures, in which I offered some thoughts about the process of using a camera, as opposed to a generator, to create X3D textures. At the time, I decided not to include examples of what I was doing mainly because it wasn't a tutorial. I've come to believe that was a mistake. So instead of making a large revision of the original post, I'll just make a short post about upcoming texturing examples I intend to share.

The fact of the matter is, texturing is a sub-project of the larger X3D project I'm doing. Texturing clearly has its own set of creative processes to go through in order to even be usable in the larger project. I'll even include a downloadable zip file for anyone who wants to try the textures out.

In the future, maybe I'll post other types of textures such as SVG Path generated patterns, especially if X3D adopts SVG as an image format. For now, we'll see how photos work out.

By Ian Hollidae, 2024/07/08

When I began looking into X3D, one of my early questions was how to go about texturing shapes. Was there some resource site where i could download textures? Did i need to figure out how to create texture using graphics software? In short, what were the rules.

After searching around, it seems the answer to my questions was there was no one way to approach it. So I decided I would start out using real life photos. In an age where every phone seemingly has a camera, we are surrounded by textures from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep.

Texturing Project

Since I have my camera with me most of the day, I figured there would be opportunities to capture textures. But I didn't want to just randomly shoot anything, so I tried to work a few basic rules:

First, if I knew I'd be somewhere inside, walls, floors and uncovered surfaces would be the targets.

Secondly, if I knew I'd be walking along outside, I tried to find things of interest.

Thirdly, no shallow depth-of-field/bokeh for anything.

Early on, it was hit or miss. I found plenty items I thought would make a great texture for a particular shape only for things not work out. Other times I would find textures I thought would be good for something later on, only to have later on not arrive.

Fortunately, I did have a nice list of successes.

Lessons Learned

Despite my efforts to plot a path forward, trial and error is sometimes the best teacher. So here are few things I learned from my project:

1. Have a lighting plan

Formal photography rules will tell you that you should work in good light in order to get the best photos. No harsh contrast, shoot at the golden hour, the list goes on.

The problem with this approach is that textures are not photography. Textures are whatever you make them in order to fit into whatever you're making. That doesn't mean light plays no part in textures. Just that light might play a different part than normal.

If you plan to capture a certain type of light, understand how it will look and interact with X3D lighting models. A reflective surface with a large specular highlight might wash out as a texture when placed under a spotlight.

2. Capture the texture in its most edit-able form

Make sure that what you capture can be edited later. For example, if you shoot a metal surface, be sure you don't capture a reflection as well. Sometimes reflections may be hard to pick up through the EVF. They're pretty easy pick up in a photo editor.

3. Don't be afraid to break habits.

Standard photography has been an on-again, off-again hobby for the past couple of years. I also create my own logos and icons as necessary. During that time, I've developed my own process for editing for both forms of images. When starting this project, I knew I'd do a lot of editing since textures would rarely be used as shot. However, I assumed I'd be drawing from my photographic editing skills.

That might or might not be the best way forward.

A case in point was my attempt to capture a smooth cement wall. The wall had slightly different tones of gray. Parts of the wall also had small crack lines. No single shot was working out as I wanted, however, so I decided to merge multiple images as layers just to see what would happen. What I wound up making was a cement texture I couldn't get simply by editing a single image. Even though I liked the end result, I never did use the texture. But I learned a good lesson from the experience.

Task Complete

The path to creating textures has an endless number of possibilities. It's been one of the more pleasant surprises in my X3D journey. Whatever you decide to do, hopefully, you have a few more tips to help you along.