[Crystal] Quartz Textures

Quartz is the crystal people reach for first and render worst, because almost everything that makes it look like quartz happens inside the material rather than on its surface. A quartz point is not a glass shape with a shiny skin: it has internal fractures that catch light as bright planes, cloudy phantom zones where growth paused, needle inclusions, and a milky base that fades into clarity toward the tip. Get only the surface right and you produce a plastic gem. These tiles supply both the surface detail and the internal structure that a shader alone cannot invent.

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 texture files themselves as a texture pack.

What's in this collection

• Clear rock crystal — transparent points with sharp internal fracture planes and visible growth striations across the prism faces. Hero props, jewellery, magical and sci-fi elements.
• Milky and phantom — cloudy white bases with ghost outlines of earlier crystal shapes suspended inside. Geological detail, mineral specimens, mystical set dressing.
• Smoky and amethyst — colour-zoned varieties where the tint concentrates unevenly toward the terminations. Decorative props, product photography, fantasy artefacts.
• Druzy clusters — beds of tiny sparkling terminations coating a rock matrix. Cave surfaces, geode interiors, texture detail on large formations.

All tiles are seamless in both directions and delivered at high resolution.

Where quartz is used

Game props and environment art. Crystal formations are a staple of caves, magic systems and sci-fi power sources, and they are usually placed exactly where the player is meant to look.

Product visualisation. Jewellery, watch faces, decorative homeware and wellness products all use quartz, and these renders are shot close with hard light that exposes every shortcut.

Film and television. Digital crystal has to sit next to practical mineral specimens under the same lighting, and internal structure is what makes the digital version stop looking like moulded acrylic.

Scientific and educational visualisation. Mineralogy illustration needs the growth features to be correct rather than decorative, since striations and phantoms are exactly what identifies a specimen.

How to use these in Blender

1. Build the base with a Glass BSDF or Principled with Transmission at 1.0 and IOR set to 1.54, which is quartz rather than the 1.45 glass default most people leave in place.
2. Feed the internal fracture texture through a Volume Scatter or as an emission mix inside the mesh so the bright planes read as being underneath the surface, not painted on it.
3. Keep surface Roughness very low but not zero. Natural prism faces have a faint etch that softens reflections slightly, and perfect mirror faces are what make crystals look like CG glass.
4. Enable a small amount of Dispersion. Quartz splits light noticeably at fracture planes, and this single setting does more for believability than any additional texture layer.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and normal, roughness and mask maps with sRGB off.
2. Use the Single Layer Water or a translucent shading model with refraction rather than opaque, and set the index of refraction to 1.54 for physical accuracy.
3. Fake internal depth with a parallax offset on a second texture layer, so the fractures appear to shift behind the surface as the camera moves without any real refraction cost.
4. Add a faint emissive tinted to the crystal colour for magical and sci-fi uses. Real quartz does not glow, but a low emissive value is how you get it to read at all in a dark cave without lighting the whole space.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Surface Type set to Transparent, or a custom Shader Graph if you need proper refraction behaviour.
2. Keep Metallic at 0 and Smoothness very high, then break it with a subtle roughness map so different faces catch light at different intensities.
3. Place a Reflection Probe close to the formation. Transparent and highly reflective materials are almost entirely defined by what surrounds them, and without a probe quartz renders as a dull grey shape.
4. Use a Detail Map for druzy sparkle rather than modelling individual terminations, which is prohibitively expensive at the density real druzy has.

Tips for quartz specifically

Put the detail inside. The defining property of quartz is that you look through the surface into a structured interior. Fractures, phantoms and inclusions sitting at different depths give the parallax that tells the eye this is a volume rather than a shell, and a flawless transparent solid reads as glass or plastic every single time.

Get the terminations right. A natural quartz point ends in six triangular faces meeting at an apex, and those faces are almost never the same size as each other. Perfectly symmetrical hexagonal pyramids look manufactured, and beveling the tip because it renders more cleanly removes the one feature that identifies the mineral.

Light it from behind and the side. Transparent materials show nothing under frontal light because there is no reflection detail to catch and no transmission to reveal. A back light passing through the crystal and a side light skimming the prism faces will do more in two minutes than an hour of shader adjustment.

Browse the collection

Crystal textures are organized into volumes, each containing multiple packs. New volumes are added continuously.

View the full Crystal collection →

Related: Ice textures, Stone textures.