Here you all go, I know how much you love free... and how much it loves you... Well, maybe not so much the latter, but you are going to be AMPED about this post! I got 44 sites with a ton of textures for you to use in your work. And it is all FREE!
-
3DXO
So let's start this off right, 3DX0 not only has a ton of textures for you to check out, but they also have a range of tutorials based in 3D for you to put those textures to good use.
-
1000 Skies
I am always looking for good sky photography for a wide range of tasks. This site has a ton of panorama HDRIs and smaller versions available for free download. You can purchase the gigantic versions if you need them though. Think about using these in conjuction with pt_Panorama featured last week or Trapcode Horizon.
-
Textures.z7server.com
With around 500+ textures available for absolutely free, you can get quite a bit of use out of this little site. Better yet, they have a link where you can donwload all the textures from one direct location.
-
Texturama.com
Texturama has a few free textures on their site, but the big part of why they make the list is their products.
-
2Textured
An absolutely HUGE collection (2786 items to be exact), 2Textured has a wide variety of what you may need, broken up into categories so it makes them easy to find.
-
Free 3ds Textures
This site has a ton of textures that are actually mostly textures, instead of half stock photography that you can pull textures off of.
-
Amazing Textures
This site is pretty awesome, because not only does it have a ton images that you can use for different things such as 2.5d compositing, among the hundreds of other uses.
-
Texturez.com
Another totally free texture website, they got categories for anything you might think of, and high quality, high resolution for you to download directly.
-
Urban Dirty
A very cool looking grungy site, Urban Dirty has a max size of all of their free textures set to 3027x2304 pixels. Thats huge... and useful!
-
Smashing Magazine Texture Contest
A while back, Smashing Magazine had a contest to go out and shoot textures and submit them to be judged and win a Canon Rebel XT, but who cares about that? There are around 2000 textures from all around the globe in their gallery for you to use free of charge.
-
Texture Vault
This marketplace lets you use their medium sized textures absolutely free of charge, but for the higher resolution stuff it costs a couple bucks... good stuff if you need something low rez though!
-
Bittbox - Free Texture Teusday
Every Teusday Bittbox gives away a free texture pack based on a theme... this Teusday, it was brown paper, next teusday, who knows? Go back through the archives and load up!
-
Fudge Graphics
Another site that does random freebie packs, Fudge Graphics has quite a few packs in their archives available for download, and they are well worth subscribing to for Photoshop tutorial needs as well as inspiration for design lovers.
-
Royalty Free Textures
Exactly what they are named. Download them all for free, and they are royalty free. Oh did I mention they are textures?
-
Spiral Graphics
Spiral Graphics has invidual textures that you can browse through and pick your favorite, but if you are like me and like to download now, think later, use the link to download everthing they have in one go, and browse through them on your desktop and don't worry about those pesky loading times.
-
Image After
At Image After there are a few ways to search for what you want with the drop down menus, or just suing the search box. Either way you will be sure to find what you need... all of these are completely free.
-
Texture King
This site has around 337 textures, with more being added all the time, all totally free, all kinds of different genres and categories.
-
Think Design
Another one of those blogs that gives away free texture packs periodically... again just go and peruse through the archives to get some texture goodness.
-
CG Textures
This site is pretty cool, because it has rollover images that let you see what the image is before you click on it. Its also really well organized and easy to find exactly what you need.
-
Morgue File
This site is HUGE with almost 10,000 texture files for you to pick and choose from. They are all free, just browse the categories of your choice and click the little dowload button, and the images that you download are super high quality, and gigantic resolution.
-
Grunge Textures
These guys have got 1,355 free high resolution images in 18 categories, and pretty sweet looking site to boot.
-
Texture Warehouse
This is a very easy to navigate, straight-forward site and they have around 750 images to choose from!
-
3Dup
This is a community based texture gallery, with computer generated pattens and things like that. You can even create an account and add your own stuff as you create it.
-
The Well Equipped Thief
This site has a ton of different texture families available for download, as well as browseable viewing before you commit to clicking.
-
Textureworks
We got about 250 free textures in 6 diferent packs available for download at this site, as well as 30 free timelapse skies that you can use in some video work.
-
Luhger Texture
A very simple texture site telling you exactly what is in every pack, and it is always updating, so bookmark it!
-
Zen Textures
A very cool site to check out, provides large thumbnails of the textures in kind of a Tumblr type of format where you can browse through 65 pages of textures.
-
Free Texture Site
Awesome original name. Again, exactly what its called... they got over 600 textures to choose from and a ton of categories to browse through.
-
Image Abstraction
These guys got almost 350 textures in their colletion, and 10 categories to choose from with more being added all the time!
-
Mayang Textures
Holy moly... 3400 textures, 5GB of data, most at 2560x1920 and all are high quality jpeg. What more can you ask for?
-
Texturebits
A simple hobby blog with new textures popping up here and there. There are probably a good 300 textures on this site.
-
3D Millenium
This site is riddles with ads and stuff, but if you can look past it there are some good little resources to grab some free textures, as well as a few tutorials.
-
Texturespot
A nice looking, easy to navigate site with some good content, Texturespot is a nice little resource for you to check out.
-
Texture Library
Sometimes sites aren't pretty to look at, and well this site is just like that (competing with 3D Millenium), but it is the conent that counts right? Check out their well organized folder system to find what you need.
-
Design Shard
Yet ANOTHER design blog that offers up freebies from time to time, is Design Shard. Make sure you go through their archives and collect the free stuff they ahve put out lately!
-
Lost and Taken
It seems like there are quite a few of these... Lost and Taken is another freebie offering blog putting out texture packs every once in a while, and again, if you go back through the archives you can get a bunch of nice themed collections.
-
Pattern Wall
This is a very cool site, in which all you do is click one part of the background, and then the background transforms into the full size of the patten and offers it up for download.
-
Autodesk's The Area
Anyone who uses any Autodesk products knows about The Area, but you might know they have a huge resource for textures as well. Keep in mind you have to register for this link to work.
-
Abduzeedo
When you look underneath the "textures" tag on Aduzeedo, you can filter through the massive onslaught that is Abduzeedo and just find all the free textures they have to offer.
-
CGIndia
Check out CGindia for a ton of different texture packs, as well as a bunch of news on the CG/VFX industry as well.
-
Media Militia
Media Militia has a lot of free packs, but only a few texture packs, but you have to look for them. There are tons of vector and image packs available for download as well.
-
3D Resources
These guys have around 150 free textures available, as well as some 3D models and tutorials.
-
Texturepop
This is a very cool site that has a ton of textures with a bunch of different categories for you to get what you need.
-
PSDTuts+
Some of you, like myself, don't check the rest of the Tuts+ Network regularly, so in case you missed all the texturey goodness over at PSDTuts+, here they are.
If you enjoyed this post, please give it a vote on Digg or a stumble to say thanks!
Related Posts
Keep reading with more great tutorials and articles!
Enjoy this Post?
We'd love your vote!
Plus Members
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials and
More for $9 a month for all Tuts+
sites in one subscription.
User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Vicky September 11th
A gr8 thx to u ll ……………..its fabulous things u provided
( )Rev65 September 11th
What a crazy, HUGE, mash-up of sites! Great job, Topher! THANKS!
( )Brad September 11th
Thanks for these links!
( )Wokk September 11th
i like http://freetexture.net
( )Martin Klekner September 11th
hey, Topher, is there actually something you dont know about in the VFX & CG world?
thanks for the collection, been looking for something like this…
( )Billy September 11th
Very cool….Topher! Ironically enough, I was just pulling a bunch of textures off Lost and Taken today.
Question for you about Lost and Taken. It appears that the last update to this site was August 7th, but up to that point the blog entry updates seem to be pretty regular. Any idea what has happened?
( )Topher Welsh September 11th
Not a clue sorry dude… haha I don’t follow it regularly
( )Grayson September 11th
Awesome article idea, Topher! I think I’ll be visiting this page quite often from now on.
( )MovieMaker September 11th
Cool
( )Rafael Guerra September 11th
Wow…I need to bookmark this article!
( )Daniel Johnson September 11th
Topher Welsh you’re on a roll! Thanks for all the helpful articles. (& Envato for paying him).
( )Björgvin September 11th
Thanks for mentioning http://www.texturevault.net
( )We’re always looking for new texture artist and photographers to join us.
marcel September 12th
hi All,
I’ve checked 1000skies.com, but it seems they ask money for all images.
$5 for 1000px partial skies and $ 100 for 360degree skies, so that’s not a free texture site.
Or am I not looking good enough?
thx,
( )marcel
Topher Welsh September 12th
I was talking about the smaller ones… I mean, they aren’t AS useful when they are like a medium size, but ya know…
( )marcel September 14th
hi Topher,
true, but you still have to pay for them… I only use these things commercial when I have the copyright for use or a Creatives Commons for it.
For non-commercial use, it’s fine.
thx. for the input.
marcel
Max Stanworth September 12th
Thanks for including design shards freebies, some of you may also find http://www.texturelovers.com/ useful for free textures
( )deniz September 12th
Ooo supper sharing, thanks man.
New texture site.
( )http://best-texture-world.blogspot.com
Diego SA September 13th
YEAH, that’s what I talk about! Good stuff for sharing, dude! Thanks a lot!
( )Nikolaus September 14th
Hey,
we are not really a texture site, but we’ve got some high resolution textures for you.
http://www.gimei.de/2009/08/kostenlose-texturen-2/
( )Michael September 17th
Hey, great textures. Thank you for this link!
( )voidmain September 14th
this is great
( )thanks man
jeyaONE! September 14th
Great post! Thanks for putting Media Militia in your list. We appreciate it! Take care.
( )Vitezslav Valka September 15th
Nice and inspiring! Smashing Mag is my favorite and Abduzeedo second place
( )ZONA DE ARTE September 19th
Thanks for this helpful article!!
( )Rick September 23rd
This is like a treasure-trove for any artist and provides with a lot of functional tools that are going to be extremely useful in a lot projects. Thanks a million!
( )jd October 30th
Thank you so much,
( )this is very useful.
Michaela November 4th
Thanks. These are really useful links for designers whoa are always on the lookout for quality textures. You may also want to check out the quality textures at http://textureonline.com
( )