[Paper] Aged Textures

Aged paper is not simply paper with a brown filter over it. Discolouration is local and caused: foxing appears as scattered rust-coloured spots where mould and iron impurities react, tide lines form hard-edged rings where damp advanced and stopped, and edges darken far faster than the middle because that is where light and handling reach. This volume covers mottled and stained stock across a range of tones, including tinted card and speckled fibre sheets, so the ageing is built into the paper rather than laid on top of it.

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

• Mottled and foxed stock — uneven cream and ochre sheets with scattered rust-coloured speckling.
• Stained and tide-marked — hard-edged damp rings and blooms across otherwise sound paper.
• Coloured fibre card — textured tinted stock with visible pulp inclusions, aged unevenly across the sheet.
• Ruled sheets with age — lined paper carrying discolouration and edge darkening, from the ruled paper volume.

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

Where aged paper is used

Game user interface. Maps, letters, journals and lore documents, where an aged sheet establishes period and history without a line of exposition.

Film and television. Prop documents shot in close-up, where flat toned paper reads as printed the moment the camera pushes in.

Print and packaging. Heritage and artisan branding, book covers and menus that need a substrate with genuine tonal variation.

Motion graphics. Documentary and archival sequences where a stained paper plate gives typography a physical base.

How to use these in Blender

1. Connect the colour map to Base Color with Metallic at 0 and Roughness high, around 0.85, since aged uncoated stock is entirely diffuse.
2. Enable slight Transmission or thin Subsurface for loose sheets, since thin aged paper transmits a noticeable amount of light.
3. Use a Displace modifier or shape keys for cockling and curl rather than a normal map; these are mesh-scale deformations.
4. Multiply a large-scale stain mask into Base Color rather than tinting the whole sheet, so the ageing stays local.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and any roughness or normal maps with sRGB off, at a resolution that keeps fine speckling intact.
2. Use the Subsurface or Two Sided Foliage shading model on hanging or held sheets so backlight passes through.
3. Expose an ageing scalar that blends between clean and stained maps, so one asset covers a fresh and a ruined document.
4. Add curl geometry to sheet corners; aged paper always deforms, and a perfectly flat page reads as printed card.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 0 and low smoothness, and enable a translucency option where the pipeline supports it.
2. Import interface documents as sprites with mipmaps and avoid heavy compression, which destroys fine speckling first.
3. Add a Detail Map at high tiling for fibre grain so a document holds up when displayed full-screen.
4. Vary base tint slightly per instance across a stack, since sheets age at different rates depending on exposure.

Tips for aged paper specifically

Age it locally, not globally. A uniform sepia wash is the single most common mistake and it reads immediately as a filter. Real ageing concentrates at edges, fold lines, handled corners and anywhere damp reached, while the protected centre of a sheet often stays close to its original tone.

Give stains a hard edge. Water damage advances and then stops, leaving a distinct tide line rather than a soft gradient. Blurred, evenly feathered stains look airbrushed; a crisp boundary with darker deposit along it reads as genuine.

Do not overdo the yellow. Most aged paper sits in warm cream and grey-beige rather than saturated orange-brown. Pushing saturation to make it look older usually makes it look artificial instead, and the tonal variation across the sheet does the work far better.

Browse the collection

Paper is organized into volumes, each containing multiple packs, alongside a separate cut-out alpha volume. New volumes are added continuously.

View the textured stock volume → · View the full Paper collection →

Related: Fabric textures, Wall textures.