By Ian Hollidae, 2026/01/20

This is a new-ish sidewalk with some uneven brushing. There's also traces of a boot print. Since the rest of the sidewalk looked normal, I can only assume whoever did the brushing was in a hurry to finish. I tried to catch the more interesting sections which I thought could make a good flooring texture.

Select a thumbnail to see a preview.

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

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.

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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.

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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.