103 FREE Models, Textures and HDRIs

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Poliigon is pleased to announce a completely refreshed free library, with 103 NEW, FREE Models, Textures and HDRIs.

Every 3D artist now has access to AAA-quality assets that they can use freely in commercial and non-commercial projects.

All assets work natively using our plugins for Blender, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya and Sketchup.

We’ve done away with the previous assortment of oddball assets, and replaced them with some of the most popular assets on the site.

Here’s some of the assets you now have access to…

Photoscanned cinnamon rolls

Photoscanned candles and grapes

We hope you get good mileage out of the new free assets!

For even more leverage, take advantage of the full range of 3,000+ Textures, Models and HDRIs.

A year in review: 2022

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Here’s Poliigon’s 2022 in 30 seconds:

In summary:

Now let’s delve into the assets…

You told us last year you wanted more assets, faster. So after some internal restructuring and pipeline improvements we went from releasing assets monthly to weekly! And in 2023 our goal is to double the total number of assets we release.

Here’s our biggest asset releases in 2022:

523 Fabrics

Our mega-drop of fabric textures was one of our biggest releases in Poliigon history, including 460 Twinbru ‘digital twin’ fabrics and 57 velvet and suede textures.

The top 10 most popular fabric textures in 2022:


135 Tiles

Our tile texture release ranged from your typical ceramic, to your rustic terracotta and pavers.

The top 10 most downloaded tile in 2022:


63 Decorations

Decorations are the small items that make a house a home; our range of artisanal decor models included vintage timber boards, rustic ceramics and geometric pots and vases.

The top 10 most popular decorations in 2022:


57 Plastics

From swirling Bakelite to molded surface detailing, this year’s plastic textures were perfect for use across interior design, automotive modelling, product design and industrial scenes.

Asset: Plastic Mold Grain 007 used by Alexandr Semonenko

The top 10 most popular plastic textures in 2022:


45 Antique Metals

Antique, hammered, enameled, rusted, scratched; our antique metal collection was specifically designed to turn heads.

The top 10 most popular downloaded metal textures in 2022:


30 Food Models

…had your 5 a day? From fresh fruit ‘n’ veg, to mouth-watering pastries and baked goodies, our latest drop of food models were one of our crowd favorites across socials.

Most popular food models:

23 Lamp Models

Coming in at the eleventh hour, here’s our latest designer collaborations with German boutique lamp designer WeraJane, exclusive to Poliigon.


Plus…

A whole range of assorted assets across categories like brick, wicker, metal cladding, cords, ground & terrazzo. Here’s what our art team did with them:


Poliigon Blender Addon

Our mission with the new Blender addon was to completely remove the need for a browser. The new addon does exactly that, ensuring that +5,000 assets are never more than a click away.

Our engineering team is busy working on plugins across other software packages, including a 3ds Max plugin that we hope to release early 2023. Watch this space!

29 New Articles and Tutorials

Our content team pivoted their focus this year to bring you a range of content that supported the professional and creative goals of our users, including:

Thanks for joining us on this journey. We can’t wait to see what you make in 2023!

New Marble

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The quintessential “high-end home” material just got a major upgrade at Poliigon with a brand new marble generator and 85 ready to download materials.

Marble: Our most versatile generator yet

Clients often have such a specific look in mind that you can’t find what you need online. Which is why we created Generators - a dynamic procedural texture that can be customized to exact needs.

We’ve already created a Wood, Brick, Fabric and Leather generator. Now we’re launching Marble, our most complex generator to date. Allowing you to customize:

  • 20 popular marble types like Carrara, Grigio Intenso, Sirio and Empress Green.

  • 33 tile layout orientations like Chevron, Herringbone, Fish scale and Isometric cubes.

  • Imperfect precision - Simple controls to add pitting, scratches, smudges or mop residue.

  • Tile and Slab mode - One button to switch between cut tile and continuous slab marble.

  • Real world scaling - No more guessing the size. This generator does it all.

Here’s a few examples of what you can do with it:

Here’s a breakdown of what it does and how to use it:

If speed is your game, we’ve got you covered with 85 ready to download marble materials created for today’s interior design trends.

Go make something awesome =)

New Ground Photoscans

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As we enter a new era of 4K as standard, texture detail has never been more important. And as we’ve said in the past, the gold standard for captured detail is photoscans.

So we’re proud to announce a massive drop of ultra-high quality ground photoscans.

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3 Reasons You’ll Love these New Scans

While it’s not hard to find photoscans online, many are plagued with problems created through shortcuts.

1. Larger captures

Repeating texture tiles is a problem most artists are all too familiar with. And while you can disguise it with clever mapping, the root of the problem is often that the captured surface is just too small.

The difference between a 3x3m capture and a 1x1m capture is 66% less tiling. Which is why all of our new scans are 3x3m by default.

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2. Sharper Captures

Unless you’ve closely inspected the scans you’re downloading, you may not know that many are missing crucial detail due to sloppy capturing.

Sharp captures require expensive camera equipment, more photos per scan and longer processing times. Our methods are far more costly than your typical scan, but create much sharper materials.

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3. Variety

Whether you’re making grassy plains, forests, gardens, fields or anything in between you’ll find something to suit your next project.

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Here’s a few examples of what you can do with them:


Introducing Indoor Plant Models

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In November 2018 I visited The Boundary, a leading archviz studio in London, to ask them what assets they needed most and they answered “High quality plants”.

“There’s lots of plant models out there, but very few are high quality” they explained.

Later the artists at Poliigon set out with the ambitious goal to create a physically accurate collection of plants that just work. No matter the lighting or environment, the plants should look realistic.

After nearly a year we believe we’ve achieved that. Here’s how we created our collection of 40 PLANTS, now available for every major software and rendering package.

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The Problem

We investigated the existing market for plants and found that it typically uses just one photographed leaf texture, mapped to a mesh:

A typical plant model - found on BlendSwap.

A typical plant model - found on BlendSwap.

The problem with this is that it’s missing vital information that can only be guessed from it’s single photo texture.

By comparison, real plants are extensively detailed. Micro-changes to it’s shape, color, reflectivity and translucency play a huge role in how it looks.

Reference photos of a real plant

Reference photos of a real plant

 

How we did it

To match the real world as close as possible, we created a custom photoscanning setup using a rotational light source to capture clean albedo and accurate displacement + a lightpad to capture the raw translucency.

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We also added something we’ll call “nature gunk” - dust, dirt, droppings etc. - which was the final piece of the material puzzle.

We then used extensive reference of the real plant to capture the exact shape and leaf distribution, which we then recreated digitally - ensuring optimized, clean meshes.

 

The Result

By combining everything, we were able to create a physically accurate collection of 40 Plants, ready to drop into your next interior.

These are ready to download now. Enjoy!

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