Improved Product Pages

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We’ve overhauled the product pages (example) to make it easier to understand what you’re getting at a glance. Here’s what you’ll find on all new textures, and eventually the whole library once remaster is complete in 2025.

Better Previews

  1. Video Previews - A new semi-turntable to help you understand the materials reflectance and displacement and tiling.

2. PBR map preview - A sliced preview of the PBR maps you’ll be downloading. Makes it easy to see what information is included.

3. Tiling preview - No more guessing whether the texture can tile enough for your scene! This 4x4 tiling is the great way to understand seamlessness at a glance.

4. Zoom preview - Now you know how it holds up at close range without needing to download it. This preview shows an exact 1:1 zoom of the maximum resolution.

5. Scene preview - Understand how the texture looks in a typical use case.

6. Location Reference - Help understand the context and location of the real surface.

7. Color Chart Reference - Have increased confidence that the white balance and colors match that of the real surface.

Eventually the entire library will have these new previews as we remaster all older content to the new standards in 2024.

Better Descriptions

  1. Improved Sidebar - Understand what you’re getting at a glance.

2. Deliverable Information - No more guessing what you’re receiving. Exact files and usage is included here.

3. Resolution and Texel Density - Understand what each resolution delivers in texel density.

4. Creation Method - Understand whether it’s procedural, photogrammetry or stereo photometric.

See everything on this asset and all new assets going forward!

We hope you like the new changes. Drop us a comment with your thoughts!

Improving texture standardization

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Our textures are higher quality than they were 9 years ago, but the newer formats have lead to an inconsistent user experience. Today’s textures have completely different PBR maps, bit-depths and resolutions than older textures.

So in an effort to increase consistency, we’re announcing our new texture standards: a framework that sets expectations for what to expect when you download our textures. Currently only new textures are published with these specifications, but our goal is to remaster all textures to these standards by the end of 2025. For now, only textures will be updated.

Read the full texture specifications for details, but here are the main changes:

  • Defined PBR Maps: A predictable set of deliverables: Base Color, Roughness, Normal, Displacement, Ambient Occlusion, Metallic and a new ORM map for realtime.

  • Improved Filenames: All files are named with the new structure of: Poliigon_DescriptiveName_AssetIDNumber_MapName

  • More Resolutions: 8K-1K for large, 8K-.256 for small.

  • Set Physical Sizes: All surfaces are 2.5x2.5m (large surfaces) or 30x30cm (small surfaces)

  • Material X - An interoperable industry standard .mtlx file that can be natively imported in multiple softwares.

The exact formats and resolutions can be set by clicking the Download settings button, in the sidebar of any asset.

Team and Enterprise Users will also have these benefits:

  • Added 16-bit TIFFs and EXRs maps: TIFFs for Team users, and TIFFs and EXRs for Enterprise users.

  • Added Source Files: When available, Enterprise user can access substance and source files per asset.

If an existing texture can’t be remastered to these standards, it will be unpublished and re-captured. The unpublished texture will remain downloadable for previous purchasers.

Read the full texture standards here. Make sure to update to the latest plugins for Blender, 3ds Max, C4D, Sketchup and Maya to correctly use the new format.

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.

Introducing Poliigon for Sketchup Pro

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Poliigon is pleased to announce support for Sketchup Pro and rendering with Vray.

Use the new Sketchup Extension to automatically create photorealistic materials, and import the new .skp models.

Instant Texture Importing

Gone are the days of needing to import texture maps one by one. Simply click the Poliigon Extension, select any one single texture map and the Poliigon Extension will import all the associated textures and instantly create a Vray material.

Instant Model Importing

Photorealistic 3D models are often too high-poly to import into SketchUp, which will either grind to a halt or flat out crash. So after talking with SketchUp users, we came up with a solution to this that is both lightweight to the viewport & photoreal at rendertime.

Left: The Proxy, Right: The model at rendertime.

The solution is our Poliigon Sketchup extension, which will import the skp (a low-poly proxy mesh used just for the viewport) but then swap it out for a V-Ray mesh (.vrmesh) at rendertime.

Additionally, you’ll be pleased to discover that objects with sub-parts can be individually moved.

While this initial launch is for rendering with Vray only, if you have another render engine you’d like supported, fill out this quick survey to let us know.

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!

How to create beautiful modeled flooring in Blender

In this article, we’ll go through how to create modeled wood flooring using a combination of the FloorGenerator addon, Poliigon's Wood Plank Generator and a custom mixing nodeGroup.

Modeled flooring has many advantages over using a material. There's no visible repetition regardless of the surface area, excellent memory usage (compared to trying to get even close, in terms of detail, with a material and displacement), and greater control over the floor as a whole.

But like anything, all these advantages must have a disadvantage - otherwise it would just be ‘the way to do it’. In this case, it's complexity and time. But, if you want the best possible results, then this article will explain the process, step by step.

What you'll need

Step 1: Generate your flooring

Install the Floorboard Generator addon via the Preferences menu, just like any other Blender addon.

You can access the addon from the Sidebar (N key by default) within the Viewport, and the flooring will generate from the 3D cursor. There are a number of values, but most are self-explanatory. I'd recommend using real-world plank sizes, if you have that information to hand - and note, there is a Random Seed value for testing different layouts within the parameters you've set.

Once the flooring is complete, fills your room, and has a layout you're happy with, tab into Edit Mode, select everything, press U and then 'Reset UV's'. This is an important step, to make sure our material works perfectly with the new flooring.

Once you've completed these steps, you should have something similar to the picture above.

Step 2: Creating the textures

Our Wood Plank Generator, a Substance .sbsar, is very similar to our Wood Flooring Generator.

You can create the same huge variety of wood types, only with the focus being on exporting planks rather than square textures. As we need to export these textures, please use Substance Player to load the .sbsar.

There is an additional parameter section called ‘Plank Parameters’ that allows you to create lots of variations of the same type of wooden plank. The more you create, the more variation your flooring will have. I'd recommend at least 4, however the nodeGroup provided for this can take up to 8 different texture sets.

The most important setting here is to get the dimensions correct. Plank Width is easy - set that to whatever the width of your modeled planks is. The Length, however, is a multiplier value, not a physical measurement. So, calculate what the ratio is for the length and put in the correct value.
(Hint: If your planks are 1m by 0.2m, your plank would be 5 times longer than it is wide, so the multiplier value would be 5.)

Once you've created a wood style you like, export a plank (you only need Color, Roughness, and Normal maps). Then, adjust the Random Seed Value above and perhaps the Sawing Radial Position, then repeat.

Keep doing this until you have at least 4 unique sets of plank texture sets of whatever wood style you've chosen. I'd recommend naming these in a sensible way, so it's easier to keep track, WoodOakPlank_1, _2, etc.

Step 3: Setting up the material

Back in Blender, make sure you've downloaded the PlankCombiner nodegroup and then using File > Append, locate the plankcombiner.blend and add in the PlankCombiner nodeGroup from the NodeTree folder.

Now, with the Floor Select, create a new material and press Shift+A in the node editor, and find the PlankCombiner nodeGroup under the 'Group' submenu.

It's now a simple - if not laborious - matter of just loading in your color, roughness, and normal texture maps for each plank you've created. Make sure each is mapped to 'UV' via a texture mapping node and that each has a normal map node connected to the normal map.

Then feed each texture map into the correct input of the NodeCombiner. The first plank in the P1 inputs, the second into the P2 inputs, and so on.

Now, all that's left to do is set the Plank Value of the nodeGroup to the number of planks you've used and you're good to go.

You can also cycle through random layouts with the Seed Value.

Optional Step 4: Imperfections

Like any material, surface imperfections like smudges, smears, and scratches can take the realism to the next level. As the PlankCombiner outputs a single color, roughness, and normal channel, it's super easy to add those in, just like you would with any other material.

Just be sure to either use generated co-ordinates, or to create a second UV map, as the primary UV map won't be suitable.

I won't go into detail in this area, but to give you a rough idea of what I used for my flooring, here are the Imperfection nodes I used:

In summary, I used a Random Per Island output from a Geometry Node to make some color and roughness variation per plank, and overlaid some smudges and scratches to the roughness and normal channels. It's most definitely an optional step - but in my opinion, it’s the icing on the already great cake.

The Best Artworks of September 2022

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It’s time for the round up of the top community artworks from September 2022. All found across ArtStation, Behance, and Instagram by tagging Poliigon:

Render of the Month

Congratulations to this month’s winner Newton Collective. You’ve won yourself a year of Poliigon Individual (300 Credits) Plan for this beautiful interior image.

How to Get Featured here

  1. Make something awesome that uses Poliigon assets (textures, models, HDRs or brushes)

  2. Post to Behance, Artstation or Instagram, using the tag ‘Poliigon’ (so we can find you)

  3. Check to see if you were featured that month! Winners will also be featured on our social media channels.

If you’re chosen as the best render of the month, you’ll win a free 12-months Poliigon Individual (300 Credits) Plan.

 

The Best Artworks of August 2022

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It’s time for the round up of the top community artworks from August 2022. All found across ArtStation, Behance, and Instagram by tagging Poliigon:

Render of the Month

Congratulations to this month’s winner Jon Raine. You’ve won yourself a year of Poliigon Individual (300 Credits) Plan for this beautiful interior image.

How to Get Featured here

  1. Make something awesome that uses Poliigon assets (textures, models, HDRs or brushes)

  2. Post to Behance, Artstation or Instagram, using the tag ‘Poliigon’ (so we can find you)

  3. Check to see if you were featured that month! Winners will also be featured on our social media channels.

If you’re chosen as the best render of the month, you’ll win a free 12-months Poliigon Individual (300 Credits) Plan.