Free Blender Resources

• 3dassets.one
3d Assets . one, formerly Textures.one, is a crawler that checks most of the texture ressource listed below this entry for what you type into the search bar. This can give you lots of great results, try it. Otherwise you have to browse all these useful pages listed below manually, but on the source pages the textures are categorized and you will find more textures than with a single search phrase. And directly on the texture pages you can find even more great textures you were not even looking for and get inspired ...


• 3D Textures
a great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures by Joao Paulo.
All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made with Substance Designer. Support the maker on patreon and you can get higher resolutions of the materials and even the substance files to create your own material from it in substance player and have almost unlimited variations and render in all resolutions you need. As of writing this there are 450+ textures on the 3D Textures website. The Scifi / Metal Plating textures here are really awesome and worth checking out! A trello board can be used to request materials, but access is limited to patreons it seems...


• Ambient CG
another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures by Struffel Productions (the site was previously called CC0-Textures).
All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made with Substance Designer. And there are a lot of materials for all kind of uses, around 1500 different materials as of writing this, most of all texture, thus the listing here in textures. There are some simple modeles like fruits with textures included and you can find textures up to 8K in size. Everything is free to use and the photoscanned textures on the site are especially good.


• Poly Haven / Texture Haven
Formally known as texture haven this is one huge asset pile now with HDRIs, textures and textured models. For textures this is another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made with Substance Designer. Almost 250 materials are availabe as of writing this (growing by roughly 50 textures a year!).


• CG Bookcase
yet another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures made by Dorian Zgraggen. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made with Substance Designer. As of writing this there are 300+ textures available. There is even a dedicated category filled with surface imperfections like fingerprints and grunge and some, check it out.


• Pixel Furnace
another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made with Substance Designer by Pixel Furnace. Almost 100 materials are available with a wide range of categories to fit into.


• Texture Box
A huge collection of free PBR Textures with some patreon exclusives mixed into them to make you support the page on patreon. This is how this page is financed.


• Poliigon
Poliigon is a huge shop for a lot of very good PBR textures and some of them are free. This link leads you to exactly these few but good free PBR textures on Poliigon. If you like it, support the blender guru and buy some textures or other assetts.


• Public Domain Textures
another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures sorted by 16 categories with some really great version available. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.



• Share Textures
another great and ever growing collection of free PBR textures. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Most materials are made from photographs and not with Substance Designer as on the previously listed pages. So this is worth checking out. There are some gemstone materials on the page that are not on the other pages.


• Patternpanda
Pattern Panda has a great collection of free PBR textures, all released under the very free CC-BY license. Lots of stones and concret textures can be found, interesting paper textures, woods, walls with stones, tiles and also vines, metals with and without rust and lots of fabric and leather materials.
Besides the PBR textures you can also find very interesting and seamless scratchmasks on the page and a few HDRs to light your scene.


• Free PBR
another collection of free PBR textures for blender. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Lots of metals and rock+stone textures can be found here. Also snowy and wood grounds.


• ArchiveCG
a new and ever growing collection of free PBR textures for blender. All materials offered there are free forever, also for commercial projects, and released under the very free CC0 license.
Lots of tiles like shiny marble or brushed metallic tiles and golden abstract materials can be found here.


• textures.com
This website offers photoscanned (and thus over realistic) textures too, also HDRIs, but this link leads you to mostly Substance Designer made textures. Textures.com has a credit system where you can buy some credits and otherwise get a limited amount of credits per day, so use them wisely or support the website itself.

• EEVEE Comics Shader
For NPR (Non Photorealist Rendering) of your models there are lots of possibilities and I hope to gather some more great NPR shaders here. NPR is mostly about toon shaders, cel shading or halftone shaders. So please check out the EEVEE Comics Shader by Paul Caggegi (previously EEVEE Toon Shader). It gives flat color shading to your meshes and adds an outline to make it look like straight out of a comic book (or better: YOUR comic book) with few colors and a hard outline.


• outlinehelper
For NPR (Non Photorealist Rendering) of your models it adds an outline to everything and over everything. This is not only a shader but Feline made it an addon that works with the push of a button and adds an outline in cycles and EEVEE and lets you tweak the outline.


• Interiors for Buildings
A parallax shader that displays a random interior on a cube. You can use this to make buildings a lot more interesting and realistic! You can now see rooms behind the windows with a few clicks. Totally Hightech.


• NASA 3D Ressource
All planets and lots of moons of our solar system mapped out. Only the color information is available it seems, no bumpmaps. Directly from the source, for educational purposes mostly, but noone is stopping you from throwing an asteroid onto a sphere with earth texture muhuhaharg!


• Solar System Scope
All planets of our solar system mapped out. Only the color information is available it seems, no bumpmaps.



• ies library
IES Files are descriptions of how lightsources distribute light into the room so interior architects can render their ideas with the correct lighting depending on what lamp is used. This is kind of a texture for the shape of the lightsource. And the library is huge. Every tutorial explaining IES files and how to use these links to ies library, if not, don't trust it :)


• Glitch Node
Darkfall offers a great Glitch node. This is actually no real shader node but a node used during compositing your final video (but where else in this list should this be put?). You can add cool colorful glitch and aberration effects. It comes with a scanlines node that you can just overlay over your video for a cool effect or you use the scanlines to distort the video. Or you use some other video or animated texture (or similar) in black and white to drive the distortion, whatever you do, have fun. There are even more compositing efffects to be found on the darkfall website but the glitch node is the best of the pack!

• TextureLab.
     
TextureLab is currently in version 0.2 but it has a lot of functionality to support you on your way to create good PBR textures. It features 25+ nodes and more will be implemented with further versions. It works a lot like Substance Designer, it is made to be a clone to SD! All calculations are done on the GPU so it is fast. It is open source and cross platform.


• Neo Texture Edit.
     
Neotexture Edit lets you generate textures with procedural generators and with lots of filters you can influence to outcome. On their website it says Its main purpose is to produce high quality textures for real time rendering applications that can be stored in a few kB and synthesized on application startup.



• Material Maker.
    
Material Maker has a node system for procedural generation just like Substance Designer but with less nodes and basic forms to chose from, but this will get better over time. The developers are actually actively asking for feedback and suggestions for exactly this for newer versions. And in the meantime you can use SVGs to create forms. Material Maker is free and open source and coded in the also free godot engine.



• Texgraph.
   
Texgraph wants to do the same as Material Maker above does, but is in an earlier stage of development, it is still in beta stage in v0.1. You can use Texgraph to generate procedural patterns and mix and overlay these with nodes just like in substance and materialmaker to create all needed textures for PBR materials but like in a version with less options...
Texgraph runs on windows only by now.



• Materialize.
   
Materialize is a program written in the game engine Unity. Not a lot of nodes can be found in Materialize but you can use materialize to create roughness maps and metalness maps and bumpmaps from images, mostly photographs. The results are very good for not fiddeling around with any nodes at all. At the moment the software is windows only and there are no plans to port it to Linux or mac.
This is more an alternative to Crazy Bump than to Substance Designer, but it is free and you did read it already anyways...



• Pixaflux.
   
Pixaflux helps you when creating bumpmaps and normalmaps and textures.
The program is not really beautiful but it gets the job done and has a lot of functionality.
The Software is currently (since forever) in Beta status and you can send feedback and it will probably be implemented.





• Armor Paint.
      
Armor paint is the most advanced open source clone of Substance Painter (not Substance Designer), but it is not as advanced and filled with features like Substance Painter. But for that it is free and useful. And it works within blender. You can import models from all kind of 3D software, also blender, and paint textures on them inside the program but don't expect all the features from commercial software. You can use nodes to tweak the textures.
The whole Armor Paint software is based on the Armory Engine, which also runs Armory 3D, a complete game engine integrated into blender as a plugin!

• Simon Thommes' procedural shaders
Simon Thommes creates great procedural shaders for blender and puts them on gumroad for free or what you are willing to pay. His procedural knitwear shader KNITTR is great for making realistic procedural clothing like sweaters. The same greatness comes from the procedural scales shader SC'LES, best used for snakes or other amphibians or maybe even rooftiles, be creative with it. The procedural Brickwall shader BR'CKS has a lot of options for cracks, texture and carvings on the bricks and displacement (slanting) of the bricks as if a drunk brick layer did build the wall, and on top of that you get some finetuning options for the mortar between the bricks, check out this awesome shader!


• Erindale
Erindale makes great customizable procedural textures. Please check them out and make good use of them and leave him a tip.
He has a really great procedural wood floor shader called TIMBER, all you ever need for archvis grounds. And his wicker material shader called WICKR is wicked and very customizable for all kinds of wicker baskets and wicker furniture.


• Blender Insight
All materials on the linked page work with cycles and EEVEE. Most of the 2.79 shaders are also really good, but optimized for cycles only. The organic materials for cycles 2.79 are great, check out the procedural cherry material and the procedural orange peel material.


• Boundless Blending
Sayan Mondal presents his 8 procedural Textures. We have a Rainy Window (with animatable raindrops!), a Leather Material, an Asphalt Material, a Concrete Material (that looks more like a rock to me, but a good and procedural one!), Smooth Wood Material, Steel Material (with rough patches), a Rough Wood Material (with lots of structure and carved bumps) and a Linen Material for textiles.
As all materials are procedural you can tweak a lot of node settings and make the basic materials more fit to your needs. Great starter materials!


• Blender Sauce
A big collection of a lot of rather boring materials, though the metals are interesting and emulate real world metals, the best looking (and imho most useful) metal materials are copper and gold. The nature materials have some interesting procedural leather shaders and an Amber shader that could need more extreme bumps but could also work as honey.


• String Fairy
Youtube User String Fairy has a nice collection of procedural blender exclusiv materials. Well, Material Tutorials, you have to follow along the tutorial to get the shader, he doesn't offer direct download of the shaders. But in the end you make your own shader even better and more detailed and more fitting to your needs and you even learn something from it, go do it, it is great.


SPECIFIC USE Procedural Textures
The links before this are collections of procedural Blender textures made by a single person or collected by a single person. In this list you find highlights from collections of procedural textures for a specific material or links to materials by a blender user that made only one material. Enjoy what is there...

• Mask Shader for wear and tear
  A very powerful and customizable shader you can use as a mask to mix 2 materials like bare concrete and tiles over it or a normal metal with a rust material. It has procedural scratches, corner detection and masking it and running down lines for more realistic rust or whatever you come up with.
  
  
• Procedural Hexagon Pattern
  Made from pure math you can scale the hex pattern and change the size of each hex within its tile. Very useful to control other textures with and to make futuristic scifi cyberpunk clothing and props. Or honeycombs...
  There is also a paid version available with a lot more functionality, but somehow gumroad does not allow you to browse the author of the addon and this list is for free goodies...
  
  
• Ubermapping Node - randomize seamless PBR textures
  This is made by Andrew Price aka the Blender Guru. And what it does is, when you have a seamless tiles PBR texture applied to a ground plane for example and zoom out far enough you can still see a repeating pattern and this kills the illusion of it being natural. This node lets you control the rotation of all instances of the single texture image, well, you control a randomness factor of the rotation of all instances and this makes the repeating pattern seem like some kind of endless non repeating natural pattern.
  You use it by appending the only nodetree in the file, and add it in the shader editor by adding a new group and select the ubermapping group. You put that node between the Texture coordinate and the image textures (where normally the mapping node would be) and connect it from the UV of the texture coordinate node.
  And then play around with the Mosaic sliders until you like the result!
  As nothing comes for free, a downside is, this nodegroup now creates seams in the pattern, but with some tweaking of the mosaic sliders you can mask these pretty well, also you use this ubermapping node mostly when zooming far out or scaling the texture very small, so the normally repeating pattern is more obvious to the human eye than then new appearing seam.
  
  

• Poly Haven / HDRI Haven
Formally known as HDRI Haven, now merged with free textures and models in a great library of free assetts it is a great collection of free HDRIs, all released under the very free CC0 license. Every type of location, time of day and lots of different clouds in the sky can be found here.


• Eisklotz
A pretty good collection of free HDRIs, indoors and outdoors, all released under the very free CC0 license. Every type of location, time of day and lots of different clouds in the sky can be found here.


• HDR Labs SIBL Archive
A really nice collection of HDRIs shot in various outdoor and indoor locations and sun setups...


• HDRI Skies
Quite some collection of outdoor skies. The smaller versions of the HDRIs at around 2048 x 1024 pixel are free, the really high res version is 15 Dollars, but you probably don't need a resolution that high.


• No Emotions HDRIs
There are a lot of HDRIs collected on this page, some are taken at the very same location but under different lighting conditions and at different times of the day. That is an interesting twist and should give you some variety within a certain consistency.



• NASA SPACE HDRIs
NASA not only has high quality surface image from foreign planets but also spacemaps and our milkyway as beautiful HDRI images called Deep Star Maps to light your scene and to use as background images for all you space renders and scifi render. Have a lot of fun with these!




• Backdrops
Once you have your HDRI set up and modeled your scene and your horizon looks a bit empty and unnatural and distorted you might want to put some tree lines there. just images as planes in the distance with images of trees and transparency where the sky would be. Some mountains would also fit, or some houses, but for now here is a list of already cut out treelines.

• Backdrop Treelines
  As the name implies, you will find exactly treeline backdrops on that page with trees of all kinds and within all kinds of seasons.
• trees and treelines at Eisklotz
  Already mentioned above as a source for HDRIs, you can also find cut out trees and treelines on Eisklotz. Also some palm trees.

• Rihan CGI Sculpt Brushes
A huge collection of black and white images that are your new sculpt brushes. From hard surface details to cloth folds and I really like the hieroglyphics brushes. Click on Bundled at the top of the list to see the brushes sorted by category.

Blendswap
The number 1 3d model exchange. Upload your own models, chose your license or just grab some cool models from blendwap. Most models you get there are free for everything including commercial use, but not all are CC0. You need an account at blendswap to start getting your free models, but it is totally worth it.


Archive 3D
Geared towards general 3D use you get *.3ds files and *.gsm files. The native blender files are *.blend, but blender can of course open these files.
Blender 2.79 can open Autodesk *.3ds files with the on-board addon "Autodesk 3DS format", which you just have to enable before using it. Just save that file as a *.blend file and you can open it with blender 2.80. The addon will surely be updated to work with 2.80, but it is probably not the top priority for the awesome 2.80 version of blender to open autodesk files...


Free 3D
Free 3D offers, like the name suggests already, lots of free 3D models for every 3D application, not only blender. Some models might have a non commercial license, so you can't use the models in a game and sell this, but you can give the game away for free or use the models in every personal project you like!
The models are sorted by various categories, such as architecture, vehicles, anatomy, flying vehicles, furniture, Scifi things, animals, plants, weapons, sports and foods.


The Mantissa Resources
The Mantissa Resources are great. You can find 10 8K Landscapes you just plug into a displacement modifier on a simple but very subdivided plane in blender and have a great mountain range in no time. Because of the huge details in all these 8K maps this is a 5Gig Download for all 10. 10 photoscanned fruits can be found here and look very good, as do the 11 bread models you can put on the table for every archvis render. Very recommended to check out.
Other than that you can find lots of tree models of varying quality here and the outcomes of the 36 days of type challenge with lots of interesting techniques to study for every letter.


Thingiverse
Everything popular that ever existed can be found on Thingiverse. From bandlogos to action figures to complete sets of parts to build tools or toys for 3D printing. A very recommended site both for getting models for your 3D scenes and for 3D printing.


3dhdscan @ sketchfab
User 3dhdscan offers a huge range of varied HD scans of objects made from a ton of single images. And the best thing about that is, that they are all released under a very free CC license.


cc0 cultural heritage models @ sketchfab
Sketchfab now offers a huge library of various cultural objects that would count as cultural heritage as 3d Models with texture under the CC0 license . This is very generous and makes it easy for you to put all kinds of treasures from the history of mankind into your blender scenes.


lots of 3D Scans @ the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian generously offers a great range of 3d Scanned objects, ranging from natural elements like corals and mammuth bones to rockets and other spacecrafts by NASA to ancient statue scans and old technology. It is probably best to hit the link for the collections on the overview page linked above and browse the collections according to what model you are searching for.


NASA 3D Models
Almost all rovers and spacecrafts NASA ever did build available for you to play around with for all your SciFi scenes and scientific visualisations.
Really a huge collection.


Free Starwars Models
Videocopilot released a lot of models when the new batch of Star Wars Films started coming out.
Please note the files are not .blend files but .OBJ with DDS Textures and optional JPG files!
The models included are: Tie Fighter, Imperial Corridor Pieces, Luke Saber, Obi-Wan Saber, Darth Vader Saber, R2-Unit, BB-Unit, X-Wing & Tatooine Moisture Vaporator


Turbosquid Free Models
Turbosquid has really a lot of models and resources, and they offer some of them for free. Follow this link and you get the search results on Turbosquid already sorted by free blender models. But you need a free account on Turbosquid to download the free models from them because of course they want you to buy some models later...
As of writing this there are almost 3000 free models to be found there. Check out the earth, completely textured and with an emission texture for lights on the shadow side.


3dsky Free Models
3dsky offers a lot of furniture models and also has a lot of free models to offer. Very useful to fill the rooms for your archvis renders with some things and also things to put on things, like, vases to put on cupboards...


Poly.Cam
Polycam is for one a useful App for your modern phone to make 3D scans yourself to use them in 3d software after that. But also you can share your scans with the community and look at that, there is a huge collection of 3D scans amassing on Poly.Cam already. There is some kind of barrier though as you need to sign up and give them your email address. This is not as free as the other options in the list here, thus it is listed so far down but maybe the see that and fix this. And worst of all, the app is only available for apple devices with a LIDAR Scanner build in, but is said to also work with a ton of photographs, but there are a lot of alternatives for that workflow. And you can still access the scans of other after signing up.


The Models Ressource
On the Models Ressource you find a lot of models ripped from videogames. You can find characters, the hero and villain and also environment models. You can submit your own rips too.
These models are great to have fun with, but be careful what you do with the models and what and how you release your outcomes. These models are intellectual property of game studios and some studios just do not like it when you do crap with their copyrighted material, no matter if you use open source software or not...


Drawing Database
Either you are not happy with the models you find online, either paid or free, or you know you can do better or you just want to take on the challenge yourself or want to give the model your own personal style but need a good starting point, Drawing Database has you covered.
The page is a really huge archive of all kind of blueprints and technical drawings for all kinds of vehicles and technical things. Just dive in and start modeling your own models in no time.

Blender Strawberry Theme
J.C. made a very yummy and tasty pastel colored Strawberry theme for blender. It is more like a good mixed and fruity strawberry shake, and it is very sweet... go check it out!


Dr. Epilepsy Addon
Well, this is a Blender addon that makes Blender behave like having a magic mushrooms trip while giving you the name giving epileptic seizure. All fonts on display change sizes randomly all the time while all kind of fully saturated colors flash over all open windows and you space out completely. It is very weird fun, give it a go!