Finding great art assets for your games is easier today than ever before.  Great art can be pretty expensive, but there are quite a few free options available where you can get high quality free 3D models, characters, textures, pbr substances, sound effects, animations, music, environments, vehicles, etc…  In this post, I wanted to share a few of my favorites.  For each type of asset, I’ve listed my favorite site to get them free.

Textures

Substance Share – https://share.allegorithmic.com/

I recently learned about this site and plugin and it’s amazing.  Simply visit the site, find the materials you like, download them and drop them into your project.

There are 100’s of materials for just about anything you could want, and they’re all customizable.

Example

Since these are PBR materials, you can modify them easily (even as a programmer with no artistic skills it’s not tough).

Character Models & Animations

Mixamo – https://www.mixamo.com/#/?page=1&type=Character

Of all the resources shared here, this is probably my favorite.  Mixamo was purchased by Adobe a few years ago and decided to change the pricing structure.  All these models & animations were originally for sale at reasonable prices (around $15 per anim), and now they’re all completely free!  There are over 50 high quality characters you can use in your games, and 1000’s of animations.

On top of all the free stuff they provide, the mixamo system will automatically retarget their animations for your other characters.  You can bring characters that you’ve modeled, purchased, or found free in other places right into the site, apply the animations of your choice, and start using them in your game.

Look at all these characters!

And a few of the 1000’s of great animations

 

Sound Fx & 2D Art

OpenGameArt – https://opengameart.org/

This site has a nice variety of assets available.  There are great 2D sprites, free 3D models, music, sounds, textures, fonts, and even text files full of character names you can use.

It’s also my favorite source for free sound effects & 2D art assets.

Particles & Models (and everything else)

Unity Asset Store – https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=popularity/query=price:0

Of course every Unity developer should be utilizing the asset store.  And while I spend a lot of $$$ on assets, there are also a ton of free assets.  There are over 1509 free models alone!

This is also the best place for free particle systems, none of the competitors come close.  Of course like OpenGameArt, there are a ton of free 3d models, 2d sprites, and everything on the asset store.

Conclusions

Again a lot of these sites have more than I mentioned, but I wanted to focus on the areas where they stand out above the competition.  I’m also always looking for more great resources, so if you have some to recommend, please drop a comment below.