3D Materials and PBR Textures

Download collections of textures and 3D materials

Perhaps the very first (and partially) important question our users have when they get to this page of the site is, "How can I even use content from this category?"

Let's found it out.

What are materials and textures for?

Before you can figure out how you can use them for modeling, texturing, or rendering, you need to dig a little deeper into the theory and figure out what is what.

A material is a set of parameters that define the surface character of an object. Usually we are talking about volume. These characteristics include color. texture, transparency, reflection and refraction parameters, etc. In other words, all these parameters define the law by which light should be reflected from the surface of an object.

Texture is the image that defines the color of the material at every point on the surface. You could say that texture is superimposed on the surface. It is a kind of canvas that creates a special map that maps the surface to a flat image. This map is called a UV overlay. In many utilities like 3ds Max, Blender, Arnold, Vray, Corona, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, you can create sweeps manually, but the program itself can also do it for you automatically.

The main thing to remember is that you can't apply a texture to an object without material.

You almost always start by looking for textures that match the surface of the object. Textures can not only be drawn or downloaded from the Internet, but also generated procedurally. However, on our site you will find a really large number of textures of varying resolutions - up to 8K. We also have seamless textures.

How to add textures?

So you downloaded a texture from our website. How do you use it? In order to show you how to use it, here is an example of texture mapping in 3ds Max.

To do this, you will launch 3ds Max and create a simple cube with an arbitrary side. Let's say 400 cm. For convenience, you can reduce the scale of the model. Next, you need to open the material panel and select "standard material". Then you need to open the options menu and select the item "diffuse color", and then click on the button in the window that appears. After that, in the tab "maps" in the new window you need to click on "bitmap". As soon as you do this, a special form for loading textures will appear on the display of the program. Next, select the desired texture and click OK - the texture will be applied to the three-dimensional model of the cube, which you created earlier.

How are the textures created for our site?

Most of the textures you can find on our site have been created manually by talented designers and artists. But there are some exceptions. You can also find here textures that were created using procedural texturing.

Procedural texturing refers to a technique where the texture is created by the computer through a pre-written algorithm. Typically, this technique is used to create textures that have noise on them. They are often used to give a three-dimensional model a more realistic look, since in real life there are almost no perfectly smooth surfaces, and noise allows you to show a slight relief in the form of light scuffs, bumps, etc.

The result of procedural texturing is a texture map - a bitmap image, which can then be applied to the 3D model in almost any 3D editor that you like. All procedural textures are reversible: they contain complete information about their creation, and they are easy to correct. If you don't like the size of the elements, for example, you can easily change it. If only numerical values were used to create such textures, the finished maps will be small and easy to scale.