The Latest - January 2022

Hey everyone,

Wrapping up the first month of the year…. That went fast!

THE LATEST

Round 1 of updates to the Texturelabs site! I’ve got a list of things I want to accomplish, and will be rolling out changes to the site one at a time. So, along with sending out this post, I’ll be pushing the first updates to the site. Please let me know if the updates cause any issues for you (trouble logging in, downloading etc), thank you!

The biggest changes are some “code-y” things to speed up the site… as of now, Texturelabs has just over 1.4 million downloads. I couldn’t quite believe that when I went through the database. So, some streamlining was in order to handle that many downloads.

Perhaps more exciting are some awesome updates to the FEATURED textures section. I have to make the sad admission that, prior to this update, the Most Popular and Newest textures were just things I manually tagged when I uploaded. However, RECOMMENDED, NEWEST, and MOST POPULAR will now be dynamically updated every day. 

RECOMMENDED: A random selection of 3-4 pages of textures each day. These will be weighted based on things I’ve tagged as standouts, plus their popularity, with extra weight given to the newest textures. I felt like Jeff Bezos when I finally got this section working. It’ll be great way to get a sense of the coolest new stuff whenever you land on the site.

NEWEST: 3-4 pages of all the Newest textures, ordered by their upload date. I hope this will be a useful category! If you’re looking for something new and interesting, that’ll be the place.

MOST POPULAR: A random selection of 3-4 pages of the most popular textures, based on number of downloads per day. When I got this code working, it was pretty fun for me to finally see what everyone is actually downloading.

Additionally, there is now a MOTION category in the Tutorials section, and New Motion Tutorials will also show up on the right hand sidebar.

TUTORIALS

One tutorial this month, the Purple Haze Effect from last week. In the comments, I noticed a few nervous concerns wondering if I’m still going to do Photoshop tutorials. Absolutely. I find moving back and forth between the programs keeps things fresh for me. I also get tons of Photoshop ideas from After Effects and vice versa.

TEXTURES

Some broken glass, some charcoal, chalk and paint… find em in the NEWEST category :)

EXTRAS

If the broken glass textures prove useful, I could probably hunt down some more old sheets of glass and break some more. I used my favorite of the images to create a quick blog post on The Perfect Shattered Glass Effect with a custom displacement map. You get all the gratification of shattering things without having to break out the shop vac for cleanup! (Note: Download the overlay and displacement maps textures in the blog post, not in the new textures)

More on the way. A huge thank you for being a continued part of the project! I hope your year is off to a great start.

Cheers,

Brady