Useful Material & Texture sources

World Building
1

Here is a list of material and texture sources I have compiled, feel free to add, remove or correct on it.

Material & Texture sources

  • www.sharetextures.com

    900+ CC0 PBR materials, some are also available in Substance Designer (SBSAR) format

  • Julio Sillet on Gumroad

    Julio Sillet makes wonderful, and sometimes obscure materials and he has a lot of free asset packs on gumroad. generally CC-BY I think.

  • AmbientCG.com

    Formerly known as cc0textures.com. Lots of generated and image based PBR’s by Lennart Demes. All CC0.
    Also check related site PBR.ONE if you are an aspiring material creator.

  • cgbookcase.com

    Good source of CC0 PBR materials By Dorian Zgraggen.
    I made material entities out of bunch of them so you can use them directly in Vircadia, just drag the json file onto the interface window to create a material entity available here

  • 3dtextures.me

    Big collection of PBR materials, SBS/SBSAR files only for patreons

  • opengameart.org

    Wonderful old-school collection of game assets of all types, mostly pixel art and isometric style assets but there are some nice textures in there, also a good source of low poly models. Check licensing for each asset.

  • publicdomaintextures.com

    Don’t know a lot about it but has some nice CC0 materials.

  • deviantart.com

    Has art and images of just about anything, but not really aimed at texturing.
    Note: may contain non-pow(2) aspect ratio images and other lewd stuff :smiley:

  • ihdri.com

    HDR skyboxes up to 16x8K, says it’s free for private and commercial use but states no specific license.

  • space3D

    Online space skybox generator

  • polyhaven.com

    The new home of HDRI haven and Textures Haven so is has PBR materials and HDRI’s, and some models too. I have not really used it yet but it looks nice.

  • pixel-furnace.com

    More materials, a royalty-free kind of license.

  • kenney.nl

    Pixel art and low poly assets en masse! I think all of it is CC0.
    Also check out kenshape for a novel approach to low poly modeling.

Image and texturing Tools.

  • blenderkit

    Blender plugin, Find materials, HDR’s, Models and more directly in blender, free and paid plans available.

  • NormalMap-Online/TextureGenerator-Online

    As it says on the box: online tools for generating normal maps and textures.

  • Agisoft Texture De-Lighter

    Free tool to remove shadows from images, useful if you want to make your own materials.

  • remove.bg

    online tool to remove the background from images

  • Krita

    Open source painting program, must have if you own a drawing tablet.

  • Gimp

    Open source image editor.

  • Substance Player

    Free tool from Adobe that lets you open Substance designer/Painter files, you can adjust the material properties and then export the texture maps for use in blender or in material entities.
    Some of the sites listed above also offers substance files so if you like a material, but maybe the color is a bit off, you can download the SBSAR file and tweak it in Substance Player.

  • Substance 3D Blender plugin

    Official plugin that lets you use (and tweak) Substance materials directly in blender.
    Note: this is very new and currently in public beta so I won’t really recommend it yet unless you are feeling adventurous.

  • Quixel mixer

    Free 3D texturing tool, alternative to Substance painter/creator. Comes with a ton of “smart materials”, if you have the disc space to install them :smiley:

  • ArmorPaint & ArmorLab

    Alternatives to substance painter and creator. I have not tried it but looks promising.
    FOSS (License) and runs on Windows, Linux, iPadOS & Android.
    Precompiled binaries are available for €19 on gumroad.

AI texture generation Tools.

  • Thomas Moore on replicate.com

    Has a model for creating seamless textures from text and one for generating Normal, Height, smoothness or AO.

  • barium.ai

    Generate PBR materials from text. I have not gotten great resaults from this yet but does have unlimmited generations at up 4K on the free tier. Requres registration.

  • ArmorLab (again)

    Node based PBR generation. Again, I did not try it yet but it should be able to generate full PBR materials and has some advanced features like inpainting and upscaling.

  • Skybox Lab

    Generate Skyboxes from prompt, many different styles available (sky works best for me).
    Downloads are 6144x3072 JPEG.

  • Poly

    Generate PBR materials from prompt and image input, up to 2K is still free (use quick generate, not make PBR maps).


Normal maps.

Normal maps comes in two different flavours, DirectX and OpenGL, most of the materials you get from the sites listed above uses the DirectX format but Overte uses the OpenGL format, it will still work and often it makes little difference but sometimes, on materials like tiles or brick wall it looks really bad, bumps look like dips and vice versa.

The solution is to convert it, which is simply done by inverting the green channel of the normal map, you can do this in several different ways:

  • Use your image editor of choice, In GIMP you click on on the red and blue channels to deselect them and then click Colours->Invert
  • You can do it in blender with a node setup like this, but you have to bake out a new texture since the the node setup does not apply on exported files.
  • ImageMagick can do all sorts of automated batch conversion. I made this batch file that, if you drag an image file onto it it, will generate a copy with the green channel inverted and “_GL” appended to the file name (in the same folder as the original and you need to have imagemagick installed).

Licensing and creator support.

Most of the materials listed here are CC0 so you can use them however you like but some require attribution and some of the tools may have more restrictive licenses, always check before using.

Generally I would advice crediting the original creator no matter the license, but it can be difficult in a dynamic environment like this, a link in the description field of an entity may be enough but I really don’t know. :man_shrugging:

If you find an asset creator in the list above that you fancy, please consider supporting them directly, You may get some additional benefits like direct file access or excusive access to new stuff, but more importantly, you help maintain an ecosystem where creators can make their stuff freely available to everyone, and still get paid for their efforts :smiley:

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itch.io - Really Great for Games, 2D/3D Engines & Assets.
Smithsonian - ~4.5 Mio Images and ~2.4 k 3D Models. All cc-0.

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