Creating Textures with Photography

I have a long history that goes back twenty years of making my texture maps from photos I have taken. In the early 2000s, I was heavily entrenched in 3D modeling and animation. Part of 3D modeling photo-realistic scenes and 3D animated movies was the necessitation of high-quality textures that I could map over the geometry. However, those resources were not as plentiful online as they are today, and I did not have the skill to create particularly good textures by hand. Enter a simple 2MP digital camera.

With that camera, I became enamored with taking close-up pictures of a wide variety of different subjects around Union College. With the help of Photoshop or Gimp, I would stitch up the edges of the photo so that I could create a seamless tileable texture map. This process worked wonders when I was building the 3D models and animation of the Nott Memorial as well as the illustrations for Mistletoe’s Night.

I continued taking pictures of textures in the years since, particularly on my trips overseas to Europe, and with cellphone cameras in the last ten years being as advanced as they are, this made the process even easier.

Early samples of my texture work from 2002

In the years since I started taking pictures, I’ve amassed hundreds of textures. A sampling of the more recent textures that I’ve captured can be found on my Unsplash collection and also on my Google Photos shared account.