Texture Libraries

Vault of sites providing downloadable textures and other 2D graphics.

Premium Sites

The following sites are mainly premium sites which either charge monthly subscription deals, or charge per item, but generally offer higher quality assets because of this.

GameTextures.com – Contains 1,000+ game ready textures to download either individually or in packs.  Each texture comes with: diffuse, gloss, specular, normal, transparency, and height maps.  They offer 3 pricing tiers;

  • Student – $15/month.  15 downloads a day.  1024×1024 TGA images.  Non-commercial License.
  • Freelancer – $19/month.  50 downloads a day.  1024×1024 TGA images.  Commercial License.
  • Corporate – $75/month.  Unlimited daily downloads. 2048×2046 TGA images.  Multi-user Commercial License.
CGTextures – It has over 100,000 textures available for download, and is growing by the day.  Its textures have been used in such high-profile games as Assasins Creed, Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, Grand Theft Auto 4, and Killzone 2.  Although many of the textures are available free of charge, their paid membership options allow access to larger resoluti0n tiled textures and higher daily data limits.  Their fees are as follows;

  • Normal – $76/year. Private use & small companines.  100MB / 24hrs
  • Extra – $154/year.  Private use, small companies, Schools & Universities.  250MB / 24hrs.
  • Corporate – $323/year.  Large Companies.  750MB / 24hrs.

Free Sites

The following sites either offer entirely free assets, or a large enough quantity of free assets to make it worth including.  The quality varies widely between these free assets, but there are some gems to be had.

cgTextures – The free membership to this site allows the user a limited download capacity of 15Mb a day.  You are also restricted to a tiled image size of up to 640 x 640, and not allowed to download any of the ‘huge’ textures they offer (usually over 4096×4096).  That being said, this still give ample scope to download usable, good quality textures from a wide range of categories.
Mayang’s Free Textures – Over 4300 free textures currently in their library.  Resolutions vary in size from 2 Megapixel for the older ones up to 18 Megapixel for the latest uploads.  You are limited to downloading 20 textures a day from one IP address. All free textures come with a small copyright logo either in the corner and/or in the centre.  This is easy enough to paint out of course, and is mainly there to deter people just uploading them directly to other sites.  It is also there to encourage people to buy their textures. There are 2 purchase options;

  1. $33 – All 4,300 textures, but still with copyright watermark.
  2. $93 – All 4,300 textures with watermark removed.  These are also unprocessed JPEGs direct from the camera, so higher quality.

Full purchase details here.

OpenGameArt – Ever expanding library of freely licensed art, so that free/open source game developers can use it in their games.  There are a number of creative commons licenses associated with the art so it is advisable to check which license each piece of art has before using it. The quality is fairly low in my honest opinion, but if you are a programmer stuck for some art to get a game idea going then you may well find something that will do the job.

Ben Cloward’s Texture Resource – Ben Cloward is a technical artist who has written many decent articles covering all aspects of game art creation over the years, and here he has uploaded around 400 of his own photographs for artists to use as textures if they so wish.  None are tilable, and the resolutions vary quite a bit, but still a handy selection.

Texturer – This site contains 1,000s of photographs taken by the site owners of a wide range of subjects.  They are conveniently sorted into sensible categories, and even offer some tiled textures.  The resolutions are somewhat low these days though with most source textures being around 1250 x 836, and most tiling ones around 500 x 500.  The quality is reasonably high though despite this, and most have been taken in quite neutral lighting conditions.

The site offers completely free downloads so long as you abide by their terms of use.

episcura - Similar to CGTextures.com.  Large library of textures.

The site offers completely free downloads so long as you abide by their terms of use.  Limited to 15MB a day.  Subscriptions are available at;

Pro – $7.99 / month for 1GB/week

Premium – $13.99 / month for 2.5GB/week