[Stone] Slate Textures

Slate is a metamorphic rock that splits along a cleavage plane rather than along its original bedding, and that single fact drives everything about how it looks. The split face is not flat and not rough in the usual sense — it is a series of shallow overlapping planes, each perfectly smooth, meeting at slight angles. Light does not scatter evenly across it; it steps. Most attempts at slate fail because they treat it as generic dark rock with a bumpy normal map, which produces something closer to basalt or asphalt. These tiles are photographed from riven roofing slate, sawn flooring stock, and split walling.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, broadcast, print, architectural 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

• Riven roofing slate — hand-split faces with the characteristic stepped cleavage and slightly ragged edges. Roofs, heritage buildings, rural architecture.
• Honed and sawn — machine-finished flat surfaces where the cleavage reads only as faint tonal banding. Flooring, worktops, bathroom walls, hearths.
• Stacked ledgestone — narrow split courses laid up as dry-stack cladding, with deep shadow between the layers. Feature walls, fireplaces, exterior cladding.
• Weathered and lichened — old slate with rust bleeding from iron inclusions, pale lichen colonies and softened edges. Graveyards, ruins, abandoned structures.

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

Where slate is used

Architectural visualization. Slate roofing, cladding and flooring appear constantly in residential and heritage projects, and the material has enough tonal range that the same specification looks very different in blue-grey Welsh, purple, or green varieties.

Game environments. Slate is the standard roof of any pre-industrial European settlement, and stacked ledgestone is a workhorse for retaining walls, wells and boundary structures.

Film and television. Period exteriors live or die on the roofline, and slate that reads as flat grey plastic is the fastest way to break a historical establishing shot.

Product and interior design. Honed slate is a common surface in kitchen, bathroom and hospitality visualisation, where its very low reflectance makes it a useful contrast against polished metal and glass.

How to use these in Blender

1. Connect the colour map to Base Color and keep Metallic at 0 — slate is a dielectric, and any metallic value at all turns it into a strange dark chrome.
2. Drive Roughness from the supplied map. Riven faces sit around 0.4 to 0.5, but the cleavage planes vary against each other, and that variation is most of the material read.
3. Use a Normal Map node rather than heavy displacement for the split face. The cleavage steps are millimetric; save displacement for the joint depth between stacked courses.
4. Add a small amount of Coat Weight only on wet variants. Dry slate is genuinely matte, and beginners routinely make it too glossy.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import colour with sRGB on, and roughness, normal and height maps with sRGB off.
2. For roofing, model the slate courses as geometry and use the texture for the face detail. Overlapping slates have a real silhouette and a strong shadow line that a flat plane cannot reproduce at any distance.
3. Use the height map in a Nanite displacement or a POM node for stacked ledgestone, where the joint depth is significant enough to justify the cost.
4. Add a vertex-painted wetness layer that lowers roughness and slightly darkens Base Color. Slate is the material where wet and dry look most different, and the effect sells rain instantly.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with Metallic at 0 and a smoothness map rather than a fixed smoothness value.
2. Set tiling from real dimensions — roofing slates are a standard size, and a roof with slates at the wrong scale reads as wrong before a viewer works out why.
3. Enable Detail Normal Map at high tiling to keep the fine cleavage texture alive when the camera gets close to a wall or floor.
4. Bake lighting with a Reflection Probe present but expect very little from it; slate contributes almost nothing to reflections, which is exactly what makes surrounding materials pop against it.

Tips for slate specifically

Respect the cleavage direction. Every split plane on a piece of slate runs the same way, because they all follow the same metamorphic foliation. If your normal map has directionless lumps instead of parallel stepped planes, the surface will read as concrete or as generic rock no matter how good the colour map is.

Do not make it black. Slate is described as dark, but photographed slate is usually a mid grey with blue, purple or green in it, and the darkest examples still sit well above true black. Crushing the values kills the cleavage detail and produces a silhouette rather than a surface.

Break the tile with size variation, not rotation. Real slate roofs and dry-stack walls use pieces of noticeably different widths and thicknesses within a course. Randomly rotating a single tile is the usual instinct and it does not help, because the cleavage direction then goes wrong; varying the piece dimensions does.

Browse the collection

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

View the full Stone collection →

Related: Ground textures, Wall textures.