If you ever needed a good texture for a scene, you probably know that good texture library is very important for any 3d artist. Even if most professionals recommend not using pre-made textures, we need something to get started. A good place to get started with textures is a website called Texture Archive, which offers a lot of free textures.
All textures there are organized into categories like:
- Architectural
- Bricks
- Man-Made
- Fabrics
- Stone
- Wood
This is just some of their categories. They even have UV Grid Maps available to download! And the textures available have a good resolution. They say that small textures are 2592 pixels wide or less.
Even been free to download, they kind of control their bandwidth by giving each user some kind of credits, called tokens. When your first sign up, you receive 1000 tokens and when a texture is downloaded, some tokens will be subtracted from your account. If you get yourself without any tokens, then you will have to wait until the next month to receive more.
If you want to check their collection, visit Texture Archive. Remember, even been free you must register to download any file. But, it`s a nice resource anyway.
13 Comments
Great link! thanks!
I normally use this one: http://www.morguefile.com/ > it have textures and any other references I need. :)
Cool one, Allan! =D
Thanks for the link.
As filsd did, I also want to contribute with another resource:
http://www.cgtextures.com/
Cheers!
those three are all great! that all i have to say! :)
Hey, do not forget on Elephants Dream production files!
* http://orange.blender.org/production-planning
Oh yes, here is an old Orange post with a bunch of texture links:
* http://orange.blender.org/blog/a-call-for-textures/
& of course BlenderWiki collection:
* http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Links#Textures_.26_Sky_Maps
This site isn't that great. *cough* see for yourself http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.texturearchive.com
Here's on of my old favourites that most people don't seem to know about (i see that I posted it for ED) is visipix http://visipix.dynalias.com/ which has had a recent overhaul so all the photos are searchable with keywords now.
Are they seamless?
Hello Plant Person,
You can learn how to make every textures seamless with this gimp tutorial:
http://www.highpoly3d.com/writer/tutorials/tileable/seamless.htm
a nice tool.
Great for all the link posted ! Thanks
Yes please, may I have some more!
"Even if most professionals recommend not using pre-made textures . . ."
What supreme rot! Sure, it's great to be know how to whip up your own custom materials from scratch. However, the above attitude is like saying a real pianist ought to build the piano and write all the music as well.
IMHO, there ought to be VAST and ENCYCLOPEDIC ready-made material library for Blender. Why should everyone have to reinvent the wheel? Sure, have lots of info and tutorials and make it as easy as possible for people to create and improve materials. This is what open source is all about, people seeing what others are doing, contributing, and improving upon the work of others.
I recently needed a really convincing brushed metal material. This is WAY more complicated than just shiny metal. Creating an 'anisotropic' material like this involves a number of texture variations and shrewdly architected material nodes. I downloaded someone else's .blend file, studied it, reproduced it piece by piece, and I STILL don't really understand it. It would have taken me WEEKS of head-banging to come up with this on my own if I could have at all. One silly little brushed metal texture!
And the same thing goes for mesh models, rigs, etc. The quality and speed of creating amazing things in Blender would increase by orders of magnitude with good open libraries of these kinds of things.
Why, that's simply stupendous! I'm goin' to use some of them soon!
Another good one is http://www.FilterForge.com
In fact, it's a plugin for Photoshop, but when you click on "filter" you can find many nice seamless textures ;)
Allan,
I wanted to personally thank you for the nice post about TextureArchive.com, I appreciate the fact that we are starting to really get noticed by those of you in the community and we enjoy meeting the needs of our users.
I'd like to point out that the token structure is mostly a element added in to allow us to slow bandwidth usage if the need arises, we have tons of bandwidth so thus far there has been no problems. We watch quite closely how many tokens are being used by any one username and we refill their tokens on a "as needed" basis and not necessarily on a monthly basis at this point.
In other words, come and download as many as you want, we'll keep you stocked up on tokens if we see you are using them up fast.
I'd also like to let everyone know that we are doing a large overhaul on the site already, even though we are just a few months into the current one. We are working to simplify the registration process by taking out all the extra "personal" information and getting just the basics from you.
We will be adding in support for our users, to upload their own textures to the site if they choose to. We'll even be adding a link under each thumbnail that can point to your own website if you wish so that you get some recognition for your contribution.
We will be switching servers as well when we launch the next version, it's a better server, with much more disk space (so we can upload more textures) and bandwidth so we can handle all you wonderful users.
There is much more going on that I cannot discuss at the moment but we hope to some what satisify "ArtInvent" in his thoughts, plus more goodies.
Please give us a little bit more time and we'll have a lot more for you.
Cheers and happy texturing.
Micah