Where to download free textures?

posted in: Textures, Tutorials | 0

All artists know the struggle on where to download free textures or how to create textures by their own. Creating them by yourself takes a lot of time and texturebases sometimes cost a lot of money.

To avoid that I will post here a few free texture websites which I think are the most noteworthy. Although I did not use their work yet I’d highly recommend to try out the textures which are provided by the texture bases.

Example texture from sharetextures

In addition artists have to make sure that they are allowed to use the free textures for their work. Considering the the purpose of the artist’s final work makes things easier, e.g. whether you sell the work or provide it to the community for free.

Depending on the work you are working on you may need additional information of the texture like Normal or Specular information. Many texture bases provide these information as well.

The following sections will have a few websites with a short explanation and license information. Thank me later 😉

Websites which host textures for free

Sharetextures

Sharetextures hosts many different textures. According to the hosters information it is an architecture group which need to create the textures anyway. Luckily they share the results with the community.

Here are a few important categories they share. As you will see most of them are heavily linked to their architectural work:

  • Animals
  • Concrete
  • Fabric
  • Floor, e.g. wood, stone, carpet and marble
  • Ground
  • Metal
  • Plaster
  • Road
  • Roof
  • Wall

Additional information about the textures are available like Ambient Occlusion, Displacement, Normal and Specular.

Additional texture information from sharetextures

They provide the textures under the CC0 license. A short note from the hosters can be fetched from their privacy policy page here. For more information you can read here more about CC0. The important chapter is ‘Questions for those thinking about using a CC0’d work’ which is shown at the end of the CC0 FAQ.

Once you read the CC0 license information carefully you will realize that the architecture group provides the textures for free and so it makes sense to become a Patron to support them.

Poliigon

Poliigon provides a huge amount of textures in almost all thinkable categories. Although one have to pay for most of the textures there are a few free available textures available as well. You just have to apply the ‘Refine by’ filter to ‘free’.

To download free textures you need to be logged in. License information can be fetched from the Poliigon License FAQ page.

Andrew also provides tutorials on how to use the textures.

Summary

It is great to have platforms for textures. Especially when you do not want to invest too much time into textures. Handling textures is not everybodies’ business. Since I am lacking of texture knowledge I am glad to have such platforms to fetch awesome textures from and use them for my work.