devenjamesDeven James LangstonRVA3D studio

Publication

Free Seamless PBR Texture Library Project

How a collection of texture photographs became a free library of seamless, render-ready PBR materials.

Written by
Deven James Langston
Published
A collection of spheres and flat samples showing colorful fabric, paper, tile, and patterned PBR materials.
A selection of rendered materials from the texture-library project.Images and materials by Deven James Langston.

From photographs to useful 3D assets

Free to download and use. Made for the fun of it.

I had all these texture photos on my hard drive, you see. And rather than do absolutely nothing with them, I decided to give them new life by converting the good candidates to seamless PBR textures.

I looped 'em. I color corrected them to minimize obvious tiling where possible, and I generated normal maps and bumps. I also made roughness maps and specular maps when they were needed. As a final step, I set them all up in Octane Render to make some pretty renders.

This article documents the broader project. The Free Seamless Rope Texture is now available as a separately documented Resource.

What are they good for?

Close-up 3D render of thick knitted fabric with open holes between the stitches.
A close-up render using the knitted material.Image and material by Deven James Langston.

With proper PBR textures, you can get away with having a lot less detail on your geometry. The holes in this blanket are simply alpha maps that tell the renderer to be transparent where the image is black.

There are various techniques for generating the additional maps needed to control transparency, specularity, and roughness. Usually, though, the latter two will require either some manual color manipulation or some hand-painting. In this case I was able to adjust the levels of the original photograph enough to produce the alpha map you see here.

Black-and-white alpha map derived from a knitted fabric photograph.
The alpha map used to make the gaps in the knitted material transparent.Image by Deven James Langston.

One more pretty render

Rendered cushion covered with a repeating patterned fabric material.
A finished cushion material render.Image and material by Deven James Langston.

And the parts that made it work

Seamless orange-and-blue cushion fabric diffuse texture map.
Diffuse map.Texture by Deven James Langston.
Purple-and-blue cushion fabric normal map.
Normal map.Texture by Deven James Langston.
Grayscale cushion fabric roughness map.
Roughness map.Texture by Deven James Langston.
Grayscale cushion fabric depth map.
Depth map.Texture by Deven James Langston.

What else should I make?

I took photos of textures for years and put them on Instagram. If you find one on there you want turned into a 3D texture, just give me a shout. I am happy to take requests for this very niche project!