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A treasure trove of textures

If you’re into such noble pursuits as geo-modeling or photo-realistic rendering, there’s a good chance that you spend a ridiculous amount of time hunting for photo-textures online. Flickr and other photo sharing sites are goldmines for content, but who has time to compile a folder of bookmarks that point to the best ones?

Our friend John Pacyga, apparently. He’s just posted a long list of his favorite texture sources — for both SketchUp and Photoshop. Some are free, some have Creative Commons licenses, and some cost money, but all are worth browsing. Set aside some time, though; this kind of thing is addictive.

If you’ve found a seamless texture (one that can repeat attractively when you paint it on a surface), here’s how you load it into SketchUp:

Instructions for Windows:

Instructions for Mac:


I found the rock texture in the screenshots above on lee.ponzu’s Flickr Textures set. Want to make your own seamless texture images? These tutorials on YouTube are a good place to start.

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6 comments :

Sketcher said...

These sites has a lot of textures: http://www.cgtextures.com/
http://www.vray-materials.de/

Thomas Thomassen said...

Step1 for Windows highlights the wrong button. It points to the Dropper button.

"Create Material" is further up.

Unknown said...

@Thomas: Thanks for noticing! I've fixed my error. Take care, Aidan

Unknown said...

I made about ten brick texture of actual bricks available in Australia so I could show my clients how they look on the walls. It took a fair bit of time but I managed to keep the file size small & the resolution high and no repetition when you zoom out . You can download them for free here www.rubysketch.com type in bricks in the search.

Milliscent Morgan said...

I like this post but still I'm looking forward about circuit board design.

JonL said...

Here is one more Texture site www.tmgtextures.com. The site has over 14,000 textures. Most of them can be directly applied to models.