[Alpha] Wood Textures

These are complete alphabet sets rather than surface tiles. Every pack in the Wood volume contains the full uppercase and lowercase alphabet cut from timber: grain running through each stroke, chamfered or ragged edges depending on the pack, and a drop shadow that makes the character sit above the surface behind it. Because the grain and the lighting are rendered into each glyph, a whole sign or headline reads as one carved object without you having to model anything.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, broadcast, print, product design and client work are all permitted. No credit, no backlink, no permission request needed. You may not resell or redistribute the files themselves as an asset pack.

What's in this collection

• Full character coverage — each pack carries uppercase A to Z and lowercase a to z in one consistent style.
• Plank and board letters — characters cut from sawn timber with visible grain direction and clean machine edges.
• Weathered and driftwood — split, silvered and ragged-edged letterforms for rustic and aged signage.
• Painted and varnished — polished golden and warm-stained finishes, some with decorative studs or hardware.

Characters are supplied individually at high resolution, so you compose words letter by letter rather than typing with a font file.

Where wood lettering is used

Game user interface. Fantasy and survival titles lean on carved wooden headings for menus, quest logs and shop signs, where the material instantly signals a pre-industrial setting.

Signage and set dressing. Tavern boards, trail markers and shopfronts in illustration and 3D scenes, assembled word by word rather than modelled.

Print and packaging. Craft, farm-shop and heritage branding where a routed timber headline carries the whole layout.

Children's and educational design. Alphabet blocks and learning material, where warm tactile letterforms are more inviting than a flat font.

How to use these in Photoshop and design tools

1. Place each character on its own layer and space them by moving layers, rather than trying to letter-space a single flattened image.
2. Mask out the surrounding area if you need a hard edge; the built-in drop shadow works best over a mid-tone background.
3. Keep every character at the same scale, since resizing one letter more than its neighbours changes the apparent grain size and breaks the illusion that they were cut from the same board.
4. Add a single shadow under the finished word rather than relying only on the per-letter shadow, so the sign reads as one mounted object.

How to use these in After Effects and motion

1. Stagger the in-points of individual characters to build a letter-by-letter assembly, which suits the carved look better than a fade.
2. Add a slight rotation offset per letter for hand-made signage; perfectly aligned wooden letters look machine-set rather than nailed up.
3. Animate a soft warm light sweep across the word to bring out the grain, keeping it subtle since the shading is already baked in.
4. Parent all characters to one null so the assembled sign can be moved and scaled as a unit.

How to use these in Blender and game engines

1. Apply each character to a plane with an unlit or lightly lit material, since the grain and shadow are already rendered into the image.
2. Match your scene's key light direction to the direction baked into the glyphs, otherwise the letters will read as lit from a different source than the sign they are mounted on.
3. For interface work, import as UI sprites and assemble words in the layout so text and localisation changes stay cheap.
4. Avoid non-uniform stretching; distorting baked grain is far more visible than distorting a flat vector letterform.

Tips for wood lettering specifically

Vary the grain, not the shape. Real carved signs are cut from different parts of a board, so grain direction and tone differ slightly between letters while the letterform stays consistent. Packs are built this way, and it is why a word made from them looks handmade rather than stamped.

Mount it on something. Wooden letters almost never float. Placing them on a plank, a painted board or a wall gives the drop shadow something to fall on, and that single decision does more for realism than any change to the letters themselves.

Do not mix finishes in one word. Weathered driftwood next to polished varnish reads as an error rather than a design choice. Each pack is a single consistent finish for exactly this reason, so build a headline from one pack and switch packs between headline and subtitle instead.

Browse the collection

Alpha is organized into volumes by surface style, each containing multiple packs. New volumes are added continuously.

View the Wood volume → · View the full Alpha collection →

Related: Wood textures, Stone textures.