[Mask] Dirt Textures

Dirt accumulates where things cannot easily be cleaned and where gravity delivers it. That means recesses, undersides of ledges, the base of walls, and the downward path of any water run. A dirt mask applied evenly across a surface produces the muddy, uniformly grubby look that reads as a filter; the same mask restricted to occluded and gravity-fed areas reads as a place that has been standing for years. This collection covers ambient dust settling, water-driven streaking, ground splash, and greasy handling grime.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, product visualization, 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

• Ambient dust — fine even settling on upward-facing surfaces. Interiors, abandoned rooms, stored objects.
• Water streaking — directional vertical runs below ledges and openings. Building facades, machinery, exterior walls.
• Ground splash — upward-fading mud and grit at the base of vertical surfaces. Vehicles, walls, fences, boots.
• Handling grime — greasy fingerprint and contact soiling. Handles, switches, controls, tools.

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

Where dirt masks are used

Material authoring. The final pass over almost every finished PBR material. Dirt is what converts a clean product-catalog material into one that belongs in a specific place with a specific history.

Game environment art. Modular levels rely on dirt masks and decals to break up repeated geometry, particularly along floor-to-wall junctions where grime naturally collects.

Architectural visualization. Facade weathering studies and renders of existing buildings that should not look newly built.

Film and VFX. Dirt passes that let a CG element match the grime level of a photographed plate.

How to use these in Blender

1. Import as Non-Color data and multiply against an Ambient Occlusion node output so dirt concentrates in recesses automatically.
2. Feed the result into a Mix Color factor to darken base color and simultaneously raise Roughness — dirt kills gloss as much as it changes color.
3. For gravity-driven streaking, combine the mask with a Geometry → Normal Z component so it only appears on vertical faces below horizontal ones.
4. Keep the effect below full strength. Dirt at 100 percent opacity almost always looks like paint.

How to use these in Substance Painter / Designer

1. Add a Dirt generator to a layer mask and supply the texture as its grunge input for irregularity.
2. Stack a world-space direction mask so the generator distinguishes upward-facing surfaces from vertical and downward-facing ones.
3. Apply the dirt layer to roughness and height as well as color — real grime sits slightly proud of the surface and scatters light.
4. Use a second, larger-scale mask to vary intensity across the asset so some areas stay comparatively clean.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5 / Unity

1. Bake the combined ambient occlusion and dirt mask into a texture channel for static assets rather than computing it per frame.
2. Use it in a Lerp (UE5) or blend shader (Unity) between a clean and a dirty material state, including the roughness difference.
3. Expose a dirt amount parameter so the same asset can appear in maintained and neglected areas of a level.
4. Apply the strongest accumulation as separate decals at floor and wall junctions, where dirt is heaviest and most variable.

Tips for dirt masks specifically

Dirt obeys gravity and geometry. Before adjusting the mask, ask where water would run and where a cloth could not reach. Those two questions determine placement better than any procedural setting.

Grime reduces gloss. Applying dirt only to base color leaves a surface that is darker but still shiny, which reads as a stain under varnish. Raising roughness alongside the color change is what makes it look like actual deposit.

Leave clean areas. A surface dirtied uniformly loses all the contrast that communicates where dirt comes from. Untouched patches beside heavily soiled ones are what tell the story of how the object is used.

Browse the collection

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

View the full Mask collection →

Related: Ground textures for the source material of splash grime, Wall textures for the surfaces dirt accumulates on.