Architectural visualization lives or dies on materials the camera can name: oak, honed concrete, clay roof, brushed steel. The best textures for archviz are PBR sets with a lighting-free albedo, a roughness that matches the finish, and a normal that holds up at 1.6 m eye height. This guide is a buying-and-scale list, not a moodboard.

Hero surfaces versus fill

Spend resolution where the lens spends time. Kitchen islands, lobby floors, and the facade in a hero elevation deserve 4K. Closet interiors, ceiling paint, and parking at the edge of a site plan do not. A 4K wood on every cabinet door will not save a 1K floor under a 24 mm camera. Match texel density: if the island is 4K on two meters, do not put 1K on the adjacent 2-meter floor. Map roles are in the complete PBR textures guide.

Interior categories that carry a still

Floors: wood, floor tiles, concrete. Worktops: marble and granite—see marble and granite for interiors. Soft goods: fabric and leather on the hero chair only. Metals: metal for taps and frames, metalness 1, roughness from scratches. Glass: shader first, texture only for frost; see glass and transparent materials. Paint is often a flat albedo plus micro roughness, not a 4K scan.

Exterior categories that sell a site

Walls: wall, brick, and stone. Roofs: tiles at real tile size. Ground: asphalt, ground, and concrete walks. Keep scale honest from the sidewalk camera. Wet-look marketing shots should lower roughness in a gravity mask, not flood the albedo with blue. Pair materials from one library so grain and contrast match; mixing a stylized wall with a photoscanned floor is the usual “CG” tell.

Engine setup and lighting

Blender, Unreal, V-Ray, and Corona all take the same metallic/roughness set. In Blender, follow how to apply PBR textures in Blender. Use an HDRI plus interior fill; PBR looks wrong under a single default sun. Tile large floors without a grid: how to tile textures without seams. For CAD mess, triplanar on concrete only.

  • 2K: furniture, most walls, secondary rooms.
  • 4K: hero floors, islands, close facade shots.
  • 1K: distant site context and background blocks.

CC0 library for billed stills

Download from the Locker3d catalog. The license is CC0, so client delivery of source files is allowed; read CC0 textures: what you can and cannot do. You do not need a paid exclusive brick for a standard housing still. More archviz notes sit on the blog.

Match the sample board, not a generic oak

Clients send a finish schedule: a named oak, a RAL paint, a specific porcelain. Your job is not to find a texture with the same marketing name; it is to match value, chroma, and roughness. Start with the closest Locker3d wood or floor, then grade albedo in a Color Ramp or Hue/Sat node until a crop next to the sample photo matches. Do not raise contrast until the grain looks “crisp”—that is how floors turn into cartoons. Measure grout width and plank length from the schedule and set Mapping to those numbers. If the porcelain is polished, roughness should be low and slightly noisy, not a flat 0.05. If the oak is oiled, keep albedo darker and roughness mid. Put the sample photo in the Blender camera as a reference plane for one look-dev session, then hide it. A 4K map with the wrong plank width still fails a client review. When the schedule changes, swap the Locker3d set; CC0 means you are not relicensing a new oak every revision.

Frequently asked questions

Which textures matter most in an archviz still?

Hero floors, kitchen islands, and camera-facing facades. Put 4K PBR there. Secondary walls, distant roofs, and under-furniture floors can stay at 2K or 1K.

Do V-Ray and Corona use the same maps as Blender?

Yes. Albedo, roughness, normal, and metalness transfer. Connect them to the engine’s PBR or metallic/roughness material and keep data maps linear.

Can I use Locker3d textures in client archviz?

Yes. They are CC0. You can ship stills and source files without attribution or royalties.