Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Sources of free 3D models

Here are some sources of free 3d models from across the web. Take them apart, put them back together, understand what makes them tick, to improve your own modeling.

Blender-Specific edit

These sites offer .blend files for download.

Sites Requiring Registration edit

Non-Blender-Specific edit

These sites offer models in other formats.

This seems to have some licensed models and might be legal trouble see Discussion at http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-237569.html

  • http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ - Google's 3d warehouse repository; take the collada version, when available ( the Google Earth downloads are actually .zip files with a collada inside them, so just rename and unzip)

Note: some of the 3d warehouse models can't be understood by blender due to a zillion repeating elements, others will show up invisible (one sided, or inside out), be gigantic in size, or all parented to some crazy spot out in space. Fixing these to be usable will push your blender skills to new levels in some cases.

Tips: I’ve tried importing a few of these 3D Warehouse models, and so far I’ve only noticed a couple of issues:

    • The model imports into a new Blender scene, called something like “SketchupScene” or “SketchupScene001”. You may also find additional scenes created with nothing in them, that you can delete. If you try rendering, you may not see anything, because the default camera is only linked into the original default scene named “Scene”. Just select the camera and hit CTRL+LKEY to link it into the new scene.
    • You may notice parts of the model appearing and disappearing as you try viewing it from different angles. This is because it is scaled very large (several hundred Blender Units on a side). Try scaling it down so it’s no more than a few BU on a side.
    • There will usually be a lot of doubles, so remove them with WKEY->remove doubles.
    • There may be many separate objects, so select what you want to combine and hit CTRL+J to join them all into one object.


Sites Using .RAR Format edit

Separated out because they may not be decodable with Free Software.

Sites Requiring Registration edit

Generating from a still image edit

Artificial intelligences can generate a 3D model from a single 2D image. You can use TripoSR on the site of Hugging Face. It runs freely without account. The render is not extremly detailled but it's way better than previous AI like OpenLRM.

The GLB export is recommanded. To use it, create a .blend project and import the file. To render the texture:

  1. Add a Principled BSDF material to the object
  2. Create a Color Attribute in the Shader Editor view
  3. Link the Color output of the Color Attribute to the Base color input of the Principled BSDF

It seems that the faces are blurred, perhaps to protect celebrities. You can easily improve details by cropping the source image on a detail and generate a model for this detail. Once both imported in Blender, melt them together.