Textures are the assets people are least careful about and most exposed on, because a texture arrives as a handful of loose image files with no readme and nothing to say where it came from.
#The CC0 libraries
- ambientCG is the broadest free PBR library going: hundreds of materials, several resolutions each, every map included, all CC0.
- Poly Haven covers fewer materials at very high quality, also CC0, alongside its HDRIs and models.
Between them you can surface an entire game and never owe anybody a credit line. Record where each
came from anyway, because six months later a CC0 texture and a restricted one are both just
brick_02_basecolor.png.
#Free tiers that are not CC0
Several well known texture sites offer free downloads under their own terms rather than a public license. Free to download is not the same as free to use however you like: some require attribution, some limit resolution or downloads per day, some restrict redistribution in ways that matter if your project is open source.
None of that makes them bad. It makes them a different category, and the terms are on their site, not in the zip you downloaded. Read them once, and write down what you concluded, because you will not remember which site had which rule.
#What a complete material needs
A material is not one image. Depending on your renderer you want some combination of base color, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, height or displacement, and sometimes opacity.
Two things go wrong:
- A map is missing, and you find out halfway through building a scene. Check before you commit.
- Maps are packed into channels of one image, which some engines expect and others do not. A packed ORM texture in an engine that wants them separate is a small job, but it is a job.
#Resolution is a decision, not a default
Downloading the 8K version of everything because it is available is how a project ends up with a 120 GB texture folder and a build that takes twenty minutes.
Pick by how close the camera gets. A floor the player walks on and a distant wall do not want the same texture. Most CC0 sites offer 1K through 8K of the same material, and 2K is the right answer far more often than people expect.
If you did download everything at 8K, that library does not have to live on your main disk. Tessera can read it where it is rather than copying it in.
Install Tessera, or read looking closely.