Essential Materials & HDRIs (for Blender)

Essential Materials & HDRIs is a massive asset library for Blender 3.0+ consisting of nearly 2,400 materials and over 500 HDRIs!

Notable features:

• Native Blender asset browser assets.
• Made for Cycles, though most materials (and all HDRIs) work with Eevee too.
• Assets are ready to go right out of the box and most are customizable.
• Easily adjust flake size and opacity for car paint, rust amount and colors for rusty metal, etc.
• 232 hues of select procedural materials (including Car Paint, Anodized Aluminum, Glossy Plastic, and Painted Wood) let you easily add and change between popular colors.
• Browse and search assets quickly thanks to organized folders and sensible tags.
• SD, HD, & UHD resolutions are available for standard materials and HDRIs.
• Nearly every material is PBR and seamless!and much more, including:

High-Quality Thumbnails

Optimized for usage at any thumbnail size

Beautiful Indoor & Outdoor HDRIs

That can be used as backdrops or just realistic lighting

Transparent Road Lines & Symbols

You can easily place on top of any of the 59 (included) concrete materials

Translucent, Double-Sided Leaves

Allowing for incredibly realistic renders

Simplified Material Settings

Easily adjust materials without digging through irrelevant settings and complex node trees

Videos

Introduction

Material displacement tutorial

What's New

v.1.1

This update patches a few of the (SD and HD) HDRIs. Updating is simple, just download the new "download links.txt" file, which now includes the link to download the update. Simply download the update .zip file, extract it to your computer, and overwrite the appropriate HDRI folders.

Please note, if you're a new customer or downloading the HDRIs for the first time you can skip this step as the files have already been updated.

License

You can use any of the assets for personal or commercial use.

For example, if you model a bedroom scene (or just a bed) using the materials in this pack and publish that scene to a website to sell, you're more than welcome to pack the materials with your objects/scenes.

Repackaging them to sell in asset packs or material/HDRI libraries (like this one), is not allowed. Anyone who purchases this agrees to abide by these terms.

Attribution is not required, but if you could link back to this page that would be much appreciated!

Disclosure

All of the standard material and HDRI files (.jpg and .exr files) were downloaded from various websites. Some were free, though many did require a paid account. You could technically go to the same sites, download the raw files, and build a similar library but that takes about six months (working roughly sixty hours a week) to accomplish. That’s how long it took me, with advanced computer skills.

The bottom line is, that I don’t want any of my customers to feel swindled if they come across any of the assets elsewhere for free. I’m mainly charging for the significant amount of work I put in after simply downloading the files, including but not limited to:

• Creating and configuring the node trees and groups
• Marking the materials and HDRIs as assets
• Consistently tagging every asset
• Setting up unique thumbnail scenes and rendering out high-quality thumbnails

I realized that without this asset library, other users would have to do all of this work themselves to utilize these assets, which is very tedious work.

I genuinely hope users find the assets worth the investment. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Installation

This asset pack installs just like any other Blender asset browser pack does. If you're unfamiliar with the process here's the procedure:

1. Download the material and/or HDRI .zip files to your computer.
2. Extract them to a folder on your computer that you intend to keep them in permanently.
3. Place any HDRI folders in the same folder as the corresponding materials and overwrite the two blender_assets files (e.g. so the "SD HDRIs" folder resides inside the "Essential Materials\Essential Materials - SD" folder, next to the other SD material folders). You can see in the screenshot below there are only four libraries in a correct setup: Procedural, UHD, HD, and SD.
4. Select the folder(s) under Edit→Preferences→File Paths→Asset Libraries in Blender (as shown in the screenshot below).

If you purchased Essential Materials or Essential HDRIs, be sure to use the ....assets.cats.txt files in the folders next to the .zip files (just overwrite the ones that are included). Otherwise, if you purchased the full add-on, you should ignore those folders and use the ones already in the .zip files.

Please note: Step #5 is now obsolete since I decided against selling the packs separately, but because a few customers already purchased them separately, I'm leaving it here.

Other Useful Info:

• DirectX normal maps are usually not used in the materials but are included, when available. Just in case you need them for other software you export to (Unity, Unreal, etc.).
• Check out this video for configuring the procedural water materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkCdhth22xI. I used this method when creating the two procedural water materials. Adding lights under the water can help the procedural water look more realistic.
• IMPORTANT: Most users will want to choose the Append (Reuse Data) option in the asset browser, so you can adjust settings individually for each material in each of your projects. Keep in mind, regardless of which option you choose, Blender still maintains a link to the files in your asset libraries. If you rename any parent folder, move your .blend files, or rename any of the folders in the hierarchy of your material library, you'll break the link between your projects and materials/HDRIs. This isn't a bug with Essential Materials & HDRIs, it's just the way Blender currently handles the asset libraries. So, be careful and be sure you have your Blender project files and your material/HDRI folders where you intend to keep them. If you need to move one of your .blend files to a new directory, the best way I've found is to open the file in Blender and save it to the new location. This remaps the paths to your assets. It's not foolproof (as I still had a missing asset or two when I did this) but it works much better than if you move them using File Explorer.
• If you have a lower or mid-range PC, you will likely just want to download the SD & HD assets. The UHD assets are only meant for high-end computers (or really simple scenes). If you know you need them, they're available, but for most users, the HD and SD assets will work great, even for high-resolution renders.
• I would strongly recommend using the minimum resolutions you can, for both materials and HDRIs. Many times, like with repeating brick materials that are going to be rendered in a small portion of your final render, you could easily use the SD material. By doing so, you ensure your scenes remain efficient. This will also let you create significantly more complex scenes (with fewer performance issues).
• The SD HDRIs are very low resolutions and were chosen as such, so you can use them just for the ambient light they cast. When using them, you'll typically want to choose the transparent option under Render Properties→Film (shown below) which will remove the HDRIs from the background of renders.

FAQs

The displacement level for one (or more) of my materials is way off.

This is an issue I am currently aware of. Some of the material displacement values didn't stick, for whatever reason, when I configured them. I wanted every asset to be drag-and-drop (and for the most part, they are) but this remains a small issue. It is very easily remedied, however, by adjusting the displacement value after applying your material, something most users would typically do anyway.

I noticed I cannot quickly scale materials on a single axis. Is this a bug or oversight?

No, I configured the material properties to work easily by allowing you to quickly adjust the X and Y scale using a single value. I couldn't think of a single time I would ever want to scale any material along a single axis, thus distorting a material. If you apply a material on a mesh and it's distorted, you need to UV unwrap it correctly. Dozens of YouTube tutorials will teach you how to achieve this.

Why do some of the materials and HDRIs range in resolution in the same collection (e.g. 1k to 2k for SD materials instead of just 1k)?

The websites I download the standard assets from often provide different resolutions. Some sites provide 1k to 4k materials and others only offer 2k to 16k. When they aren't available in the same, common resolution, I simply use a low-res asset for the SD collection, a high-res asset for HD, and a very high-res (yet still reasonably sized) asset for the UHD collection.