Asset Sources

Asset sources for furnishing building models

This page covers where Vernacular can legally source 3D models, textures, and decorative patterns to furnish and finish building models. The categories that matter are furniture, appliances, fixtures and hardware, doors, stained and leaded glass, potted plants, wallpapers, trim, and floor textures. We model historic and vernacular buildings (for example an 1889 Victorian Italianate), so web formats (glTF/GLB, OBJ) and PBR textures are the most useful, and 19th-century content is a welcome bonus.

The full working catalog lives in the repository under asset-sources/. Eleven research lanes sit in raw/, merged into sources.md (sorted by how safely we can ship each asset), coverage-matrix.md (a category-by-category view), and tier1-shortlist.md (the action layer, with concrete download URLs and confirmed licenses). This page is the readable summary. Start with the shortlist when you actually go to fetch assets.

What "bundle-safe" means

A source is bundle-safe when its license lets us ship the raw asset inside the app with no extra obligations. In practice that means CC0 or public domain with no redistribution clause. CC-BY also works if we keep an attribution credit somewhere in the app. Anything more restrictive is reference-only, or off the table for shipping, even when the file downloads for free.

The trap to watch for is "free to download" that is not "free to redistribute." A web app that serves raw glTF and textures to the browser is redistributing them, so several well-known libraries do not qualify for us no matter how good they look.

Categories we can ship today

These categories have clean CC0 coverage right now.

Textures (floors, walls, brick, stone, plaster, fabric, roofing):

• Poly Haven, https://polyhaven.com/textures, CC0. Full PBR, seamless.
• ambientCG, https://ambientcg.com/, CC0, with a bulk REST API at https://ambientcg.com/api/v2/full_json. This is the automation backbone, and its CC0 status was re-confirmed against the license page.
• CGBookcase, https://www.cgbookcase.com/textures, CC0. The terms even allow reselling.
• TextureCan, https://www.texturecan.com/, CC0, 4K minimum.

HDRIs and lighting:

• Poly Haven HDRIs, https://polyhaven.com/hdris, CC0, up to 16K.

Potted plants:

• Tiny Treats House Plants, https://tinytreats.itch.io/house-plants, CC0. Over 100 purpose-built houseplants in glTF/OBJ/FBX, and the strongest single pack we found.
• Poly Haven plants, https://polyhaven.com/models/plants, CC0. Few models, but photoscanned and high quality.

Furniture:

• Sweet Home 3D BlendSwap-CC0 pack, https://www.sweethome3d.com/importModels.jsp, CC0. 175 textured models under one license. The packs come as SH3F (zipped OBJ plus textures), so extract them for a glTF pipeline. The Scopia, BlendSwap-CC-BY, and KatorLegaz packs add about 725 more models under CC-BY. The license terms were re-confirmed this session.
• The Base Mesh, https://thebasemesh.com/, CC0. Clean-topology, UV'd base meshes that you texture yourself.

Period decorative-arts scans (CC0, but high-poly, so they need retopology for the web):

• Smithsonian Open Access 3D, https://3d.si.edu/cc0, CC0 per object. Includes 19th-century American furniture, lighting, and hardware.
• The Met Open Access 3D, https://www.metmuseum.org/hubs/open-access, CC0 for the majority. Strong American Wing material.
• Cooper Hewitt Carnegie Mansion model, https://www.cooperhewitt.org/open-source-at-cooper-hewitt/mansionmodel/, CC0. A late-1890s interior with textures, and the best period anchor in the catalog.

Museum collections are CC0 overall, but a minority of objects carry usage conditions, so check the CC0 badge on each one.

Categories with no ready CC0 3D, and how we fill them

Four categories have no usable CC0 3D models. For each one, the plan is to start from public-domain reference and then render or generate the asset.

Stained and leaded glass: render public-domain line-work as textured or alpha-mapped planes in the window openings.

• Belcher Mosaic Glass catalog, 1886, https://archive.org/details/catalog00belc, public domain. The best leaded-glass design set.
• Library of Congress, J. and R. Lamb Studios archive, https://www.loc.gov/item/2009632511/, public domain. About 2,500 design drawings; filter to the 1860s through the 1910s.
• International Art Glass Catalogue, 1914, https://archive.org/details/internationalart00nati, public domain. Domestic and Art Nouveau leaded windows.

Trim and millwork: sweep public-domain profile drawings into 3D molding, then overlay public-domain ornament.

• Roberts and Co. catalog of mouldings, 1891, https://archive.org/details/IllustratedCatalogOfMouldingsArchitecturalOrnamentalWoodWork, public domain. Section drawings convert directly into sweeps.
• HABS/HAER measured drawings, https://www.loc.gov/collections/historic-american-buildings-landscapes-and-engineering-records/, public domain. Exact period cornices, brackets, and casings.
• Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (Smithsonian CC0 scan), https://archive.org/details/grammarornament00Jone, for relief and decal patterning.

Appliances: generate from period catalog illustrations.

• Reference: Sears Roebuck No. 104, Spring 1897 (Public Domain Mark), https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-104-spring-1897, and Montgomery Ward No. 57, 1895, https://archive.org/details/cataloguebuyersg0000mont. Clean engravings of period stoves, iceboxes, lamps, and plumbing.
• Generation: self-hosted TripoSR (MIT, the cleanest rights), https://github.com/VAST-AI-Research/TripoSR, or Hunyuan3D 2.1 (owned output, with an EU/UK/South Korea territorial clause), https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan3D-2. The hosted Rodin/Hyper3D tool has the best quality and uses licensed training data, but its free-tier commercial terms are ambiguous (the official terms say usage depends on your subscription plan), so use a paid tier or self-host for clean rights.

Wallpapers also lean on public-domain scans rather than tileable CC0 textures, because the generic CC0 wallpaper textures are plain substrates. The period patterns come from museum scans, made seamless and applied:

• Cooper Hewitt Wallcoverings, https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/, CC0 where flagged. The premier archive.
• The Met Open Access, through the API at https://metmuseum.github.io/, CC0.
• New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/, CC0. Use the public-domain filter.

What to avoid

These come up often and are not safe to ship:

• Fab and Quixel Megascans. The Standard License forbids redistributing the raw asset, and most Megascans content stopped being free at the end of 2024. Render-only for us.
• Unity Asset Store free tier. Free to download, not free to redistribute.
• The 14 BIM and CAD object libraries (BIMobject, 3D Warehouse, GrabCAD, and the rest). All forbid bundling, and many carry provenance risk on user uploads.
• Most hobbyist print repositories. MyMiniFactory defaults to non-commercial, Cults3D to private use, and MakerWorld forbids redistribution. Only their explicit CC0/CC-BY models are safe. Printables and Thingiverse are the cleaner two.
• Textures.com. Keeps the IP and forbids redistribution.

Where to go next in the catalog

• asset-sources/tier1-shortlist.md for the per-category list with every download URL and license.
• asset-sources/sources.md for the full tiered catalog and the remaining license-verification notes.
• asset-sources/coverage-matrix.md for the category-by-category coverage and gaps.