10 Free: Tools for Making Your Own Forest #10Free

Download 3D models, textures, sound effects, and even a ZBrush brush to help you create a digital forest or botanical garden. All items here are free to download and use. We’ve also thrown in a few suggestions if you want to use something more robust.

Featured image credit: Peng Chen @austincppc

1 Cinema 4D Model Pack: Forest Trees

Compatibility: Cinema 4D

What it does: It’s a free pack of 3D tree models.

• 17 assets in .OBJ format, 4K textures (Diffuse, Gloss, Normal, Opacity)
• LOD versions
• Optimized for large-scale scenes
• Absolutely FREE License

Download: Cinema 4D Model Pack: Forest Trees

2 Yellowstone National Park Sound Effects

What it is: Public domain .mp3 files of sound effects recorded at Yellowstone. Get bird sounds, wolves, elk, geysers, and more.

Download: Yellowstone National Park sound effects. They have video clips too.

3 ALTER ’49 – Terrain Pack

What it is: You need terrain for your forest scene, right? 3.9 GBs of production-ready assets that were created for a student short film. The freebie includes:

• 24 Assets
• 3 Types Mountain, Grassland, Canyon
• 4 Categories Hill, Valley, Horizon, Surface
• 8K Textures Height, Normal, SLOP, Convex
• Tutorial for Maya, 3DS MAX, Cinema4D
• Optimized for Every Software
• Absolutely FREE CC0 license

Download: Alter ’49 Terrain Pack(put in $0 to download for free)

4 10 Tree PNG Cut-outs

What it is: Kaiserbold of the CGI Studio has some tree images that are cut out and ready to be placed into your scene. He also has some people cutouts that you might like.

Download: No Longer Available.

5 50+ Free Hybrid Scanned Materials

Compatibility: Substance Alchemist, probably others too.

What it is: Twigs, Leaves, Stone Debris Elements

Download: Substance Free Materials

6 Low Poly Trees from Ada King

Compatibility: Cinema 4D Octane Ready

What it is: Download low poly models modeled by Ada King

Download: Low Poly Trees

Also, check out Ada King’s other tree-related models.

• Low Poly Desert Pack
• Low Poly Forest Pack

7  Free 3D Plants from XfrogPlants Libraries

Compatibility: Choose from V-Ray 3.2 for 3ds Max, V-Ray 3.1 for Maya, as well as our other ten formats: 3ds (.3ds), 3ds Max (.max), Cinema 4D (.c4d), Lightwave (.lwo), Maya (.mb), MicroStation (.cel), modo (.lxl), OBJ (.obj), Terragen (.tgo), and Vue (.vob).

What it is: Enjoy a free plant species from each of the Xfrog 31 libraries! Try before you buy! Download on our Samples Page.

Download: Xfrog Samples

8 Free Stock Textures

Compatibility: They’re mainly jpg images so they should be compatible with a lot of software.

What it is: Tree free textures, images, and photos of stumps, woodpiles, bark, and more.

Download: Free Stock Textures

9 ZTree plug-in for Pixologic ZBrush

Compatibility: Pixologic ZBrush

What it does: Need to make some random trees in ZBrush? This handy plug-in can help you model trees or vegetation.

Download: ZTree plug-in for Pixologic ZBrush, More info

10 Tree Models from SketchFab

Compatibility: Check the specific model for specs

What it is: Sketchfab has loads of great models for you to peruse. There are free ones and paid ones available on their site. Here are a few examples: