Poliigon 3D Texture & Model Library

My favorite place to get 3D material textures is Poliigon.com, a site founded by the Blender Guru himself, Andrew Price. The quality, selection and ease of use with Poliigon assets is unmatched.

I’ll cover what’s available on Poliigon, what I like about it, what I don’t like and pricing to help you decide if it’s right for you.

This page may contain affiliate links which pay me a commission if used to make a purchase. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

What is available on Poliigon?

Poliigon.com has a large and growing library of 3D assets. The most valuable thing I’ve found has been their texture library. Their textures are high quality and affordable. Poliigon also has 3D models, HDRIs, background images and brushes.

Poliigon PBR Material Textures

Poliigon textures come with maps for color, gloss, reflection, normal, bump and displacement. There are options for “specular” or “metallic” workflows on most and they can be used with any 3D software.

When we purchase a texture, we get all of these maps in all available resolution sizes. We can download any and all of them with a single purchase. If we ever need to re-download them, it’s easy and there’s no additional cost.

The textures download as a .zip file and are named so they are recognized by software programs and plugins automatically. This means we can use tools like Node Wrangler to automatically set up our material nodes (just don’t rename the files).

Surface Imperfections

One of my favorite categories on Poliigon is the surface imperfections. These are texture maps to add scratches, stains, grunge and other imperfections to any material we use. Almost every scene can benefit from adding these.

3D Models

The 3D models from Poliigon were originally just objects for interior archviz scenes (potted plants, books, food, etc) but they’ve expanding their library quite a bit.

Material Generators

A newer feature on Poliigon is we can download generators for certain material types. Instead of buying a whole bunch of different wood materials, we can purchase a wood floor generator for 100 credits (we’ll cover credit prices next) and make hundreds of variations of wood floors with it.

If you’re using Blender, you’ll have to download substance player (free) to use the generator files but other programs have plug-ins to use them directly.

High Dynamic Range Images (HDRIs)

The HDR images on Polligon.com are high-quality, but there are other free sites like Poly Haven that have great selections too. Here’s a post that’s all about using HDRIs in Blender.

Alpha Brushes & More

Poliigon has a selection of alpha masked brushes. When you explore the textures, you find some other helpful things like street signs, leaf textures and more.

The Poliigon Plug-In

Poliigon has recently released a series of plug-ins for Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DSMax. These allow us to bring assets from Poliigon directly into our scenes and to preview materials in our scene before purchasing.

This is incredibly useful and it’s the best way to use the Poliigon assets in Blender. Here’s more about the Poliigon Add-On for Blender.

Poliigon Pricing

I’ve found Poliigon’s pricing plans to be reasonable given the quality of assets they provide. Everything is paid for with credits, which we can either purchase in packs or in one of their three subscription tiers.

There are a number of free items you can download for personal use simply by creating an account.  

For some reference on pricing, most textures cost 10 credits and 3D models on the site generally cost between 10-25 credits. The following pricing is current as of February 2023.

Subscription Pricing

Subscriptions are the most economical (and now the only) way to buy credits. They renew monthly but we can save about 25% by getting an annual plan.  Credits no longer expire (they used to). You can cancel a subscription plan at any time.

This pricing has gotten a lot cleaner than it used to be. There used to be more options with different licensing rules for different levels. Now it’s a straight-forward credit system.

Credit Pack Pricing

As of February 2023, credit packs no longer appear to be available from Poliigon.com.

Previously credits were sold in packs at the following rates:

Free Poliigon Assets

Whether you purchase a subscription plan or not, simply creating a Poliigon account gives you access to the free assets on Poliigon.

There are several free textures, free models and free HDRIs that can be downloaded to try them out. We can filter assets to only see the free ones on the site.

Poliigon License

Poliigon materials, 3D models and other assets are available for both personal and commercial use with some reasonable limitations. You can not share or redistribute the assets. See the Poliigon licensing FAQ page for details.

Final Review

I love the quality of assets on Poliigon.com. I haven’t found a site with a better combination of quality and selection. That being said, there are more and more places to get free assets these days. So you may find what you need on sites like Poly Haven. But if not, Poliigon is a sure bet for quality.

I love Poliigon. Please check it out and if this article was helpful at all, please remember that by using the links I’ve provided, I receive a small commission (at no cost to you) if you make a purchase and that really helps. Thank you and stay creative!