Art Assets for Game Developers

 

This page contains links to art assets for game developers. If you have any suggestions (for new sites to list) or comments (on anything listed on this page already), please let us know in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

 

Free Resources

General:

• Open Game Art: Free, legal art for open source game projects (includes models, sprites, textures, sounds, music).
• Free Game Arts: Promotes the use and development of free and “open source” game resources, including 3D models, sound effects, textures, games and development tools.
• WikiWorlds: The goal of this wiki is to create virtual worlds under a free content license.

Graphics (2D):

• SpriteLib GPL: Static and animated sprites that are free for any use.
• Lost Garden free game graphics: Danc’s miraculously flexible game prototyping graphics for small worlds.
• Reiner’s Tilesets: Tilesets, sprites, and graphics mainly for isometric games

Sound:

• The Freesound Project: A collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.
• pdsounds: Public domain sounds, a free sound library.
• FlashKit SoundFx: An ever growing list of shareware and freeware SoundFX for download.
• DrPetter’s sfxr: Retro sound effects generator.

Music:

• Jamendo: Free and legal music downloads.
• Free Music Archive: “It’s not just free music, it’s good music”.
• Incompetech: Royalty free music search.
• Open Music Archive: A collaborative project to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings.
• Nosoapradio.us: All songs free for personal and commercial use in games/video.

Models:

• The Official Blender Model Repository: Free Blender resources.
• Kagor Legaz’s 3D Models: Variety of Blender models.
• Google 3D Warehouse: 3D models for use in Google SketchUp.

Textures:

• CG Textures: The world’s largest free texture site.
• Mayang’s Free Textures: Over 3800 free to download, high-resolution textures.
• Texture Archive: Neat collection of environmental and fabric textures.
• Image * After: A large online free photo collection. Download and use any image or texture and in your own work, either personal or commercial. (Site includes images as well as textures).

Animation:

• CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database: 2605 animations in 6 categories and 23 subcategories. Free for all uses.
• mocapdata.com: Commercial site with over 4000 free animations in addition to their premium animations.
• Truebones: Inexpensive commercial motion capture in BVH file format. Some free files available upon request.

Fonts:

• Open Font Library: High quality open-source fonts.
• The League of Moveable Type: Only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.
• dafont.com: The fonts presented on this website are their authors’ property, and are either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.
• Acid Fonts: Large collection of free fonts.

Icons:

• famfamfam icons: Popular free icon set for web projects.
• Tango Icon Library: Contains a basic set of icons for the most common usage.
• game-icon: Over 2000 game icons and counting.

Text:

• serendipity: Various random name and description generators (may be good for RPGs).

Reference:

• Wikimedia Commons: Browse free photographs, illustrations, and diagrams.
• Creative Commons Search: Search for Creative Commons licensed content (images, videos, music, etc.) on multiple sites.

 

Commercial Resources

• Frogames content packs: Inexpensive content packs mostly for Torque and Unity3D.
• Dexsoft: High-quality model packs with LODs, textures, and animations. Available in multiple formats.
• 3DRT: Looks more expensive and of lower quality than Frogames and Dexsoft. (Some free content.)
• MyFonts: Good commercial fonts website. Features “WhatTheFont” feature to assist in identifying fonts based on images.
• Scirra: Company behind Construct 2, site includes Royalty Free Assets (templates, sounds, music, sprite fonts, animations and tilemaps).

Notes: The Frograms and Dexsoft content packs look well-designed and economical for indie game developers using Torque or Unity3D.

 

Related Resources

These websites are a bit of a mixed bag as their content is generally not directly targeted at games or their prices may be too high for indie developers.

Graphics (2D):

• Open Clip Art Library: Good resource for vector clip art, but how often is that used in games?

Graphics (3D):

• TurboSquid 3D Marketplace: Well-established website, but quality and costs vary greatly.
• ShareCG: More targeted at artists wanting to gain exposure. Membership (free) required to download assets.
• Archive3D: Mostly furniture and other high resolution models for architectural visualisation.
• NASA 3D Resources: A growing collection of 3D models, textures, and images from inside NASA. Free to download and use.
• 3D Model Repositories list: From the accompany website for the book Level of Detail for 3D Graphics. More research focussed.

Classic game assets:

• VGMusic: Video game music from classic games.
• Sprite Database: Sprite rips from classic games.

 

Other Lists

Here are a few similar lists maintained on other sites:

• Game Content Resources page on The Game Programming Wiki
• Art Collections archive page on gamedev.net
• Free 3D and 2D art and audio resources page on the FreeGameDevWiki

 

Thanks to the following members of the PIGMI mailing list for suggesting some resources: Chris McCormick, Rohan Anchan, Saxon Druce, Paul Turbett, Matt Fracassini.