8 great free texture sites

There are gazillions of free textures out there but they’re scattered all about the place. Check out the following sites to try out high end textures, dabble with a variety of environmental images, or to genuinely start giving colour and substance to the 3D world you are creating

CG Textures

The world’s largest free texture site, it says. Let’s say you need a bison hide texture for your model, well you’ll find it here along with 30,000 other free samples. Some might need a bit of work, but you can spend days searching this site.

Mayang’s Free Texture Library

Expect the unexpected with Mayang. The current collection numbers 3800 free textures, including all kinds of environment images, including doorways, walls, streets and eight flavours of litter.

Marlin Studios

Hit the Samples section of the Marlin Studios site and soak up freebies from 19 of their texture packs, as well as some free models thrown in. Great for games artists. This window is from the Rustic Settings collection.

Michael Kotek

Another slightly unexpected one, this 3D artist gives away hi res textures in 20MB morsels. His first texture pack includes about 150 free hi res textures. You can also download some 3D trees.

Arroway Textures

Fantastic surfaces on offer, and Arroway’s neat system lets you download lower resolution examples of just about any texture they sell, for free. The only restriction is that is must be for non-commercial use.

Environment Textures

There aren’t millions of free ones to download here, but what you do get is quality and variety. This oil drum jostles for position with environmental textures like statues, as well as your usual array of seamless tiling arrangements.

TexturePortal

There are two great things about TexturePortal. Firstly you can download free hi res textures from most of their main sets. Secondly, you can download their entire sets at low resolution (150×150) to try out. Bump maps, specular maps, everything.

3D Texture Gallery

Hundreds of free textures are available across numerous categories like walls, sky and metal. Some may take a little work as the quality varies and some files are fairly small.