[Paper] Notebook Textures

Ruled paper is deceptively exacting. The line spacing, the margin position and the paper tone are all standardised, and viewers have seen so much of it that any deviation registers as wrong even when they cannot say why. It is also one of the few surfaces where the pattern is printed rather than physical, so the rules sit flat on the sheet with no relief at all — a fact that most attempts get wrong by embossing them. This volume covers the common formats: college and wide ruled, graph and grid, legal pad, and tinted stock.

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

• Ruled and college paper — blue horizontal rules with a red or pink vertical margin on white and off-white stock.
• Graph and grid — fine square grids in grey and black for technical, engineering and planning surfaces.
• Legal and tinted pads — yellow, blue, grey and green stock with double margins and wider spacing.
• Aged and stained sheets — ruled paper with mottled discolouration and edge staining for older documents.

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

Where notebook paper is used

Game user interface. Journals, quest logs, note-based puzzle mechanics and handwritten clue systems, where ruled paper immediately signals a personal record rather than a system message.

Motion graphics and explainer video. Hand-drawn and sketch-styled sequences where the ruled sheet grounds the animation as something written rather than generated.

Print and packaging. Stationery mockups, education branding and editorial layouts that need an authentic paper base rather than a flat white background.

Web and app design. Note-taking interfaces and skeuomorphic backgrounds where a real paper texture separates content areas from chrome.

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 uncoated paper is almost entirely diffuse.
2. Do not apply bump or normal mapping to the rules themselves. Printed lines sit flat on the sheet, and embossing them is the single most common error with this material.
3. Use a very fine bump only for the paper fibre, at a strength low enough that it reads at close range and disappears at distance.
4. Enable slight Transmission or thin Subsurface for single loose sheets, since a page held up to light shows what is printed on the other side.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and any roughness or normal maps with sRGB off, keeping resolution high so the rules stay crisp rather than turning grey.
2. For user interface use, import as UI textures with mipmaps enabled and avoid aggressive compression; thin printed lines degrade faster than almost any other content.
3. Set tiling from real dimensions so line spacing matches the page size. Rules scaled too wide instantly read as a decorative stripe pattern rather than as paper.
4. Add a subtle vignette and edge shadow when a sheet sits on a surface, which does more to sell it than any increase in texture detail.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 0 and low smoothness, or an unlit shader for flat interface panels.
2. Keep sheets as separate quads with real geometry rather than one tiled plane, so page edges and slight curl are visible.
3. Add a Detail Map at high tiling for fibre grain so the surface holds up when a page is displayed full-screen.
4. Vary the tint very slightly between sheets in a stack, since paper yellows unevenly with age and exposure.

Tips for notebook paper specifically

Keep the rules flat. Printed lines have no thickness. Adding them to a normal or height map produces a surface that looks corrugated under raking light, which is the fastest way to break an otherwise convincing page.

Get the margin on the correct side. Ruled paper has a single vertical margin near the left edge, and the sheet is designed to be read with that margin on the left. Mirroring the tile to hide a repeat flips it to the right, which looks subtly wrong to anyone who has used the material.

Curl the corners. Paper almost never lies perfectly flat, and a page rendered as a hard rectangle reads as a decal. A single lifted corner with a soft shadow beneath it does more for realism than any resolution increase.

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 ruled paper volume → · View the full Paper collection →

Related: Fabric textures, Background textures.