[Plastic] Matte Textures

Matte plastic is deceptively hard because it sits in the narrow band where a surface has almost no reflection but is definitely not diffuse. Turn roughness all the way up and you get chalk or unglazed ceramic; leave it too low and you get satin. Real matte plastic keeps a broad, very dim highlight that spreads across a whole curved face, and it usually gets its finish from a textured mould rather than a coating, which means the micro-pattern is a repeating spark-eroded grain rather than random noise. These tiles are photographed from injection-moulded housings, soft-touch coatings, and 3D printed 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

• Moulded pebble grain — the fine spark-eroded texture used on the majority of consumer housings, with its characteristic tight irregular cell pattern. Appliances, tool bodies, automotive interiors, consumer electronics.
• Soft-touch coated — rubberised finish that is deeply matte, slightly warm in colour, and shows fingerprint and oil marks readily. Camera bodies, remote controls, premium packaging, handheld devices.
• Bead-blasted and technical — an even fine grain on engineering polymers, often in black or grey with visible filler speckle. Instrument cases, laboratory equipment, industrial and sci-fi props.
• 3D printed and layered — visible layer lines, stepping on shallow angles and a slightly dusty surface. Prototypes, maker scenes, near-future props, rapid manufacturing.

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

Where matte plastic is used

Product visualisation. The majority of manufactured objects are matte moulded polymer, so this is arguably the single most commercially used material in the field, and it is normally the hero surface rather than a background one.

Game environments and props. Modern and near-future settings run on plastic housings, and the moulded grain is what stops equipment reading as untextured grey blockout geometry.

Film and television. Digital doubles of practical props have to match injection-moulded surfaces exactly, and matte plastic is unforgiving because there is no reflection detail to hide an error behind.

Industrial design presentation. Finish selection is a real decision in a product programme, and showing the same form in pebble grain, soft-touch and bead-blast is a routine part of a design review.

How to use these in Blender

1. Keep Metallic at 0 and set Roughness from the supplied map, typically in the 0.5 to 0.7 range — pushing it above 0.9 turns plastic into unfired clay, which is the most common failure here.
2. Do not raise Specular. Plastic has an IOR near 1.5 and the default is already correct; lowering it removes the faint edge highlight that identifies the material.
3. Use the grain through a Bump node at low strength. Moulded texture is measured in tens of microns, and heavy bump makes a phone case look like a rock.
4. For soft-touch, add a small Sheen value. The coating scatters light at grazing angles in a way that plain roughness cannot reproduce.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on and roughness and normal maps with sRGB off.
2. Set Metallic to 0 and Specular to 0.5, then drive roughness from the texture; a constant roughness across a moulded part is the fastest way to make it look like a placeholder material.
3. Use a curvature or edge mask to lower roughness slightly along corners and raised features. Handled plastic polishes where fingers rub, and that worn sheen on edges is what makes a prop look used.
4. Keep the grain tiling at true scale. Moulded texture does not scale with the part, so a large panel and a small button share the same grain size in reality.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 0 and a smoothness map inverted from the roughness texture.
2. Add a Detail Normal Map at high tiling for the moulded grain, and keep the base normal for larger form features such as parting lines and vents.
3. Place a Reflection Probe even though the surface is matte — the broad dim highlight still needs something to reflect, and without it the material renders as flat colour.
4. Vary base colour very slightly between instances of the same prop, since production runs and UV exposure both shift plastic tone over time.

Tips for matte plastic specifically

Keep a highlight, however dim. The line between matte plastic and ceramic is entirely in the specular response: plastic retains a broad soft highlight that travels across a curved surface as the light moves, while a fully diffuse surface does not. If your render looks like painted plaster, the fix is almost always to bring roughness down rather than to add more texture.

Include the manufacturing marks. Real moulded parts have parting lines, ejector pin circles, gate marks, draft angles and recycling stamps on hidden faces. These read as flaws to remove, but they are exactly what tells a viewer the object was manufactured rather than modelled, and they cost nothing to include.

Let it age by polishing, not by scratching. Plastic that has been used does not accumulate dirt evenly; it becomes shiny where hands, sleeves and desks rub against it, particularly on raised edges and around buttons. Adding a low-roughness wear mask to those areas ages an object far more convincingly than scattering scratches across the whole surface.

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

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Related: Rubber textures, Metal textures.