SO I was looking for some PBRs the other day and I realized it was just time to buck up and get some premium credits at textures.com, I went with the 1000 monthly credits deal because it sounded like a great deal (and it is still IMHO) but the things I needed only took a couple hundred credits and I never got back in to grab a bunch of things to claim all my credits before the month ended and it just renewed.
So, I think this sub is great so I have credits whenever I actually need something specific. But I don’t want to just lose 600 or 800 credits again when I could stock up on some things that will be useful later.
It’s worth mentioning now that I’m also still learning Blender and haven’t learned a lot about materials, Substance, Marmoset, etc yet.
I guess my question is, what are the things on textures.com that are the most useful to grab first when you don’t have a specific need in mind? What will have the most value to me later in my textures, scans, and materials collection?
I know I can just grab a bunch of random things that look neat at the time, but that’s pretty hit or miss and I already have gigs and gigs and gigs of stock and other random crap that I don’t use.
Anyone want to give me the benefit of their experience?
That entirely depends on what you want to make with 3D. If you’re doing archvis, you’ll probably want fabric, wood, metal etc, whereas, if you want to do characters then you might want, skin, scales, or sculpting alphas. I do a lot of environments, so I use a lot of rock, mud, bark, grass etc.
Some good all round textures are things like grunge maps or cracks that you can use in many situations.
As a side note, I’ve never really had the need to subscribe to textures.com, as I’ve almost always found everything I need for free from amazing sites like polyhaven.com, ambientcg.com or cgbookcase.com (You can also use something like 3dassets.one to search all of those sites at once). Is there anything in particular that textures.com does better?
Thanks Andrew, I appreciate the advice. I’m also interested in environments, but also hard surface modeling, and architectural components of environments like a spaceport with brutalist architecture for example.
I don’t know that there is some majorly higher quality with textures.com, just that most of the tutorial and course makers I follow use them for their textures and I don’t mind paying someone for a valuable service, addon, etc. 13 bucks doesn’t hurt too much to pay, I just want to get the most out of my subscription. Unfortunately the credits don’t roll over though, which would be really nice.
It’s worth mentioning that I picked up the perpetual Substance designer and painter licenses on Steam back during cyber weekend. I haven’t had an opportunity to get into them yet but one thing I do know is that they don’t include any asset/Substance Source credits. So Textures.com would be a great way to supplement the loss of that asset bank.
It is worth just scrolling through the whole library and picking out things you want.
I haven’t had a subscription for the site but I do download the free versions of the textures. There are things the site offers which I have found to be a bit hard to find elsewhere, particularly image textures. You should have a look at the alpha masked backgrounds such as mountains, hills, and trees. I use them a lot to help populate the backgrounds of scenes.
The masked decals are also good. Things like leaks and cracks can make a scene more realistic by adding detail and hiding repetition of tiled textures. I find that they are quite versatile for making environments.