Where I can find royalty free house walls textures?

I want to make a gamelevel inside the house but i've found out that it's quite hard to find worthy textures of walls. But I see many people use good textures in their projects. So the question is: where I can get them?

 

what's your budget? and what 3D software/tools are you using?

you could start by looking on the asset store. after that, there are various 'marketplace' type sites where people provide textures for 3D. try cubebrush and artstation, for example. some is sold, some is free.

then there are texture-specific sites you can easily find with a google search. just be aware, though, that some of the more 'shovelware' sites are full of stuff they've not actually got permission to redistribute.

 

my friend has a quixel mixer license and she says it is very handy to make and mix pbr materials, other material u can use textures.com

 

there is a couple big free texture libraries you'll find easily from google.

otherwise look at gametextures.com or megascans.

also check out texturehaven for freebies. (and hdrihaven is adjoining for free hdri skyboxes)

 

Thank you, guys.

Yeah, that's the real problem. You don't know who to trust.

 

Look at Filter Forge. It is a piece of software that procedurally generates textures based on "filters". Find the right filter in it, tune the options to your liking to create unique textures. Many filters also have options for all the maps, such as specular. It doesn't cost too much, especially with the regular offers on their site, and there is a free trial period.

https://filterforge.com

 

Seconded. Filter forge has insane depth of options and community filters for just about everything. And as pointed out, on some of them, you can export all the elements you need like spec, norm, etc.

There are only two downsides to FF in my opinion:
1) soooo many filters. Yea, not a downside in a real sense, but if you need a nice rock texture you can spend hours looking through the options (at least I do). Also, there is a lot of junk there.
2) their upgrade/marketing/monetization is incredibly annoying. They constantly push their "sales" which are not sales, since they are always on, there is never not a sale. non stop emails about "last chance". They regularly upgrade, which are paid upgrades, and contain new feature that newer filters require, and often when PS upgrades, you need a paid upgrade to FF. It's basically an ongoing series of payments (and changing tiers). I typically only use it couple of times a year, and often need to upgrade, it's a hassle. (though they do have a sub now, but is basically the same price as photoshop itself.)

The product is useful for generating texture, especially if you are going to do it a lot. The company and community are pretty annoying though.

 

If you're working heavily with 3D software, Substance Designer is an alternative to Filter Forge.

For example :





(from https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2NWGJ)

 

They used to offer a lifetime upgrades package. That always sounded wildly unsustainable to me, so I thought they must be going out of business any time soon, but they never did. The tool itself can be very useful, but in my experience it was annoyingly slow to render highres images. Didn't upgrade in a while, maybe it's better now.

 

Oh, yea, forgot about that, it is insanely slow, even on a fast machine.

 

I gather you're trying to save every dollar, but Substance Designer is definitely a worthwhile investment in my opinion. You really don't need anything else for any kind of texture.

 

I've bought Substance Painter some days ago and now i don't have much money. Does it worth to buy Substance Designer too? As far as I see now, S Painter is quite enough for my needs?

Maybe, if I already have S Painter, i would better buy Filter Forge? Or S Painter is enough.

My goal is not to make best AAA textures for walls, just ordinary textures that look good.

Thanks guys for your advices.

 

I have all three and for 95% of texturing tasks I just use Substance Painter. I think Substance Designer is too slow of a process for making textures from scratch with it, unless you want to do very specific things that would be too hard to do with other tools. Focus on getting good at using what you already have is my recommendation.

 

You shouldn't buy things without knowing why.... most all of the major programs have a free trial version...

anyway, i second that you dont need to buy designer. that is a specialist program that doesnt really have use outside large AAA teams.

with painter your workflow for creating wall textures will go something like this:

grab photo from online
manipulate channels to derive PBR textures from raw photo
export to unity

you dont need to spend much time in the program at all, unless you really want to ofcourse.

the only issue is creating tiling textures. maybe you can accomplish that in painter but i always used photoshop for that. in most cases you can probably start from an image that is already tileable though.

 

If you have substance painter then have you had a look at substance share?

https://share.substance3d.com/

 

No, I haven't. Looks promising, i need more time to check this out. Thank you.

I get it.

 

If you want to make textures such as bricks, Designer is what you need, not Painter. However you can buy textures if you don't want to make them from scratch. It's probably best to avoid making textures from scratch, but if you have a lot to make in a specific style and not too much money to spend, it might be worth it.

Painter is good for, well, painting. Personally, I consider that to be too much of a time sink considering how much resources I have. Besides the iteration cost, it was un-intuitive for me and never stable, with my textures always getting infected by the dreaded 'black plague'.

So I use Designer for everything, using baked maps such as material color, ambient occlusion and curvature to drive effects. By setting things up this way, creating a new set of textures is as easy as baking the maps and plugging them into the material setup you created, no handiwork required.

 

Found this online (blender):

Spoiler

No smart masks in it though.

 

I've never really used Blender for painting, except a few attempts when I was starting off where I remember not being able to get my painting to appear in real time because of the way you have to hopscotch your way through Blender's viewports in the right order to make stuff work.

But I think even Substance Painter would be way more iteration-friendly. Being able to change textures at any time, paint to normal and AO at the same time etc. I seem to remember you can even change brush properties or something and update all the previous work that was carried out.

If I was interested in maxing my art skills I would use it, but I need to ruthlessly cut down on time. IMO baked maps driven texturing in Designer is more than sufficient for getting a good quality result.

As an example, I did this quite some years ago using Designer only:

Spoiler

 

I've used both Blender and Painter for texturing. Blender used to be a little more unwieldy, as you couldn't paint multiple layers at once, and you couldn't even start without doing a few steps first, including creating the texture, saving it to disk possibly, and something else I can't remember. It seems that more recent versions removed a lot of that headache, but I don't think it will compare yet to Painter for the more complex stuff.

Painter is really nice for many uses. The way you can paint directly on the model is nice(but not unique). But you can easily project textures in tri-planar space, and painting with brushes works well, so by using Painter you can generally get away with "less than perfect" UV mapping as well. And it has plenty of other features that aid in making things nicer, smart masks, filters, and similar goodies.

I've also used Substance Designer some. It can actually get some good results pretty fast, particularly if you aren't going for AAA quality. There is so much included as far as procedural nodes that once you figure out some tricks to combine them you can bang out some basics really quick. It is that last 10% that takes a lot of time(like basically everything with gamedev).

I have subscribed on and off for the Substance LIVE thing. If you are actually using it, the $19 a month that applies to many people is an extremely fair price(though some people are put off by subscriptions of course).

 

It's not an alternative, but a "decent enough" solution if you can't grab painter/designer.

 

You CAN make brick textures in substance painter from scratch:




The "brick generator" from substance designer is available as a procedural texture in substance painter that you can use to generate masks for fill layers. There is more overlap between the tools than you think in the procedural texture generation area. I never actually "paint" with substance painter, at least not if I can avoid it.

But usually you'll be better off just finding and buying a procedural brickwall substance that you can use to customize to your liking. Imho there really only is a fairly small number of usecases where substance designer makes sense to use, and it got even smaller since unity dropped support for the substance plugin to generate textures with on runtime (or did they un-drop it again?).

Substance designer makes a lot of sense when you have the ability to build a fully automated texturing pipeline around it where you prep models with standardized color id masks and fully automatically texture them with substances. If you have something like that set up for your game then kudos to you, but realistically most people asking which of the two tools to get, will never reach the point where this is what they want to set up. And if they do, they can still buy SD then.

 

Right, but the brick generator is from Designer, and Painter isn't really needed in that case.

Personally, unless I was using brushes I don't see what Painter offers over Designer. That automated workflow you mentioned is what I use and recommend for time-strapped indies looking for a good fast result.

On top of that, I've found Designer really great for creating visual effect sprites. I've made all sorts of nebula, wormholes, flares, explosions, laser bolts, engine glows, UI elements and all kinds of stuff. The Slope Blur node is something I sorely missed for years before I even knew what to call it.

 

For me personally for texturing a bunch of one-off assets that don't share enough in common to create a streamlined auto-texturing pipeline for them, substance painter is just sooo much faster to get the result that I want from it.

 

I disagree, especially in the original context I mentioned it, ie procedurally generating textures. That's not an AAA-only thing.

You can do the exact same photo-processing workflow as you talk about in Designer. But with far more control and customisation.

Or you could do it in Alchemist, which blows either out of the water for deriving textures from photos




Note, though, that I didnt suggest Designer as a panacea for all texturing. I suggested it as an alternative procedural texture designer to Filter Forge. Filter Forge has a massive library of user-submitted presets (13000) but the vast majority of them are (IMO) relatively useless for texture generation for 3D, they're either filters, very abstract, or relatively lofi. It takes a bit of work to find suitable ones and then you probably have to tweak them.

Substance Designer, on the other hand, is specifically aimed at texture generation for 3D, and generally, the user-created presets you'll find will be of pretty high quality for immediate use, but with the ability to customise them further.

As it is, both Alchemist and Designer are actually more focussed on the photo-processing based workflow you described than Painter.

Painter is focussed as a model painting/texturing tool, Designer is focussed as a texture generation/processing tool. When the question was about obtaining specific textures, dismissing the tool aimed at generating textures is counterintuitive. And to dismiss it on the basis of 'its only suitable for AAA studios' is just incorrect.

If the OP has Painter and that works, then fine, (and in fact describing that workflow properly would probably be really helpful to them), but saying Designer isn't suitable for that workflow, when part of its design is about doing that workflow, doesnt help anyone.

 

damn, replied instead of edited.

 

FWIW, if what someone primarily wants is texture painting, and they have a low budget and/or their 3D package isnt up to it, ArmorPaint looks like its going to be a cheap (and open-source) Substance Painter analogue. Early development stages, though.

 

Absolutely, I'm sure Painter is necessary for many kinds of custom artwork, and if I was working as an artist I would definitely learn and use it. It's just that for my situation, and I imagine the situation of many indies, the Designer pipeline is just the level of trade-off that works.

I'm looking to go even further and do away with unique textures altogether, if I can.

 

Any time you consider authoring something from scratch, you have to consider the time investment. Given the availability and low cost of high quality material libraries, I cant see authoring materials in substance designer to be good investment for tiny indies, unless they mean to start some kind of business like gametextures.com or develop skills to land a job as a specialist.

If you spend half a day creating a tiling brick texture in designer, in that same time you could have acquired dozens of textures from online, edited them to your liking in painter, and got on with level design in your game instead of asset creation.

The time you spend authoring custom materials in designer has already been done faster and cheaper and every material imaginable is already for sale across many libraries. In other words, from business perspective, I dont see time investment to author materials in designer to be cost effective.

I recommend painter over designer for the indie because it can be used to edit all range of textures and materials, convert and pack textures, etc. It's like a multitool versus a nailgun. One has focused and limited range, the other can do anything.

 

I totally agree that if the OP just wants a single brick texture, no need for any of this stuff. The point is that Designer is for making textures, if that's what you want to do. It doesn't take half a day to make a brick texture once you know your way around the nodes.

If you're buying textures, you may not need Painter at all unless you want to do handiwork.

The key thing about Designer is that it offers a reasonable enough pipeline for texturing assets instantly, as well as an incredible amount of ability to create shapes, patterns and textures of all kinds.

Like I said, I have no use for handpainting based on my art strategy. That's really all that Painter offers (it's a very good workflow of course if that's what you want). So I think that's where we are probably looking for different things.

The question of what tool to use really depends on where the OP is at in terms of the rest of their art pipeline.

 

'authoring something from scratch' is a strawman here. Half the Substance files you'll find out there come in .sbar format, meaning that can be modified in SD. And SD can use any Substance.

Yeah 'if'. meanwhile In the same time, you could have done pretty much the same thing in Designer or Alchemist without starting from scratch. You could have acquired dozens of textures from online, processed them to your liking in painter, and got on with level design in your game instead of asset creation.

You're creating a false dichotomy here... none of the three packages mandate you having to work from scratch.

No, its not like a multitool versus a nailgun. Neither SD nor SP can do everything the other can.

 

A couple things that make painter worthwhile even if you aren't using a stylus:

texture packing/conversion
image editing
easily tweak textures on models your purchased


basically, if your workflow is that you mostly work with purchased models, it's best tool (over photoshop or anything else) for changing the textures on those models to fit your project.

One problem with purchased models and textures is that they never designed for the shader you are using. So dropping into painter and exporting with shader presets makes that trivial issue to fix.

 

Im giving the information I think is important to the OP to help them make decision. Not here to argue semantics with you.

 

What like 'Designer is only suitable for AAA studios?'

That's opinion, not information. And you certainly wanted to argue semantics when it was your viewpoint.

Im just making sure the OP gets balanced information. Which is that all the things you're saying should be done in Painter can also be done in Designer, with the exact same advantages you claim are specific to Painter.

 

Indeed, the main thing I haven't seen replicated by some workaround in Blender yet is the full material brush system, that can paint multiple parts of the material at the same time, with different textures/settings for each. Painter lets you define say a 0.8 roughness, some red Albedo Color Texture, another for height, etc.., and in a single swipe of the brush paint all of those at once. For any basic painting, even masking off parts and doing layers based on masks, it works fine. Its just in my opinion there is a line you cross where Blender is simply not good enough for this purpose, where using Painter will have saved all that time.

 

80.lv website mentioned another possible cheap solution for the photo-to-material workflow. The free Substance Player, and a Substance designed to do that very thing...

https://gumroad.com/l/texture2mat

(Would probably work with Batch Tools and Automation Toolkit too.)

 

The video does does pretty much that.

However, in blender you'll have separate mask for each material and you would need to setup blending manually. On other hand, said material can be anything.

The reason why substance painter works is because they heavily parametrized materials for specific PBR workflow, which allows you to encode all material data in something like two 3 or 4 textures total. The painter paints that texture stack on per-pixel basis.

 

Does it really though?! (Insert meme here).

Honestly though, if you were limiting it to fill layers with masks in Painter, then what happens in the video is pretty close...but it isn't nearly the same thing as painting with an actual full material brush. With an actual brush you can paint directly instead of just "revealing" fill textures like with masks.

I think it is the biggest thing holding Blender's texture painting from being more competitive to Painter. Painter has lots of other features, but the lack is something that wouldn't be too difficult to work around, but full material brushes....that's another thing.

 

Full material brushes require material to be restricted, though. In Blender you'd be able to paint with volumetric material, for example. Or with anything.

I suppose someone could invest into multi-texture painting for principled BSDF, though.

 

This is true, and is great for Blender since it includes the full-blown renderer, etc... while Painter is more dedicated just to textures for other 3d renderers.

I think in Blender, if they simply set it up to have a brush have multiple brushes at once(not different sized, but different colors/textures), and then let you point each of those to a separate paintable texture, it would be a nice generic way to paint a full BSDF material...but it could also work for any "material" you wanted to define by binding the brush part to whatever texture you wanted...and then each texture would connect to whatever node you wanted. This would let you paint any combination of things you wanted, far beyond the simple limited PBR material stack.

 

That looks like a good and very affordable suggestion. Seems similar to Bitmap2Material, which was made in Substance Designer too.

 

Quick question if i may. Has anyone tried this:

https://unity.com/products/unity-artengine

Looks like a quick way to go from a photo to pbr material, if the website is to be believed...

 

"Please fill out the form below, and an expert will reach out to you shortly to set up a demo."

To me that means it's probably prohibitively expensive.

 

Textures.com is a website that offers digital pictures of all sorts of materials.

 

There's some indication that at one point,the standalone ArtEngine started at $12 per month for a single user.

 

Might be a bit pricey then just to do a one off job

 

It's actually around $95 per month and a Pro License is required. https://store.unity.com/configure-plan/unity-artengine

 

There are ready togo assets for interiors, is it suburb residental type you want? For example

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/urban/hq-residential-house-48976

or

https://assetstore.unity.com/packag.../suburb-neighborhood-house-pack-modular-72712

 

That's a big jump, then.