Textures.com alternative and applying (PBR) textures to our spooky corridor

[proc24]

Hey guys,

In the lecture Spooky Corridor UV Unwrapping of the course Blender Environment Artist: Create 3D Game Worlds Grant uses image textures from Textures.com. This is just a quick thread to let you know that textures.com no longer provides 15 free credits per month apparently (as multiple other threads have pointed out). You can go ahead and register and download textures for free at Polyhaven.com, like this concrete texture I used for my wall: Wall Bricks Plaster PBR Texture.

Now this is not an image texture, but a PBR texture. I was having a rough time finding image textures on polyhaven, which was likely because I was not searching correctly. If you find your self in the same spot and you want to use a PBR texture instead of an image texture then follow along.

When downloading a PBR texture, your download content will look something like this:

Now Im sure Grant will go into detail which of these maps do what later in the course (he did so in the complete character creator course where we created the orc), so I will just skip ahead and rush you through how to apply them in blender.

1. (Optional Step) Enable the Node Wrangler Add-On in Blender under Edit > Preferences > AddOns

This step is optional and you can set up the material nodes manually, but its just faster to use the addon.

2. Select your wall or the ground in the viewport. Then create a new material:

3. Select your Principled BSDF Node in the Shader Editor and Hit Shift Ctrl T, which will activate your Node Wrangler AddOn. Then select all of your downloaded textures and press Principled Texture Setup down below.

NodeWrangler will do its magic and your material should now look like this:

You can repeat these steps for different PBR Textures and create different materials for them. My corridor currently looks like this:

[FedPete]

@proc24

NodeWrangler will do its magic and your material should now look like this:

This magic happens, because the filename have special labels in them. Like ‘NORMAL’, ‘DIFFUSE’, etc. see Node Wrangle add-on manual, for specifics about this ‘magic’ feature.

Have fun.

[proc24]

Thanks for pointing that out, I actually did not know that. Guess I can appreciate that Polyhaven downloads come properly named . But good to know for the future

[Dwayne]

The textures are image textures. PBR textures just means that they are a set of images that are optimized for PBR workflow. The color texture at polyhaven will have color, diff, diffuse, or albedo at the end of the name. Hope that helps.

[NP5]

Thank you for this explanation for others.
Polyhaven does not have such basic simple images that are not what most think of as proper materials, as in the full set of maps.

As this lecture was the very first introduction to adding any image colouring to a model I suspect Grant kept it very simple and only added a simple image map alone.

This may be in part why he used texturesdotcom as they unusually for a materials site had such simple images amongst their offering. Their change of policy has been a real irritant!

In fact for what is done in this lecture anyone could just take a photo of a suitable wall, concrete ground etc. That is all it is.

[proc24]

Yeah you have a point, absolutely. I was careful not to go into too much detail of what these maps are and how they apply, because I agree it would probably be too much at this stage. But good that you pointed out that we can also just google some concrete floor images and use these with a bit of tweaking in the UV Editor, thanks!