[Tile] Subway Textures

Subway tile looks like the easiest surface in the world to fake and is one of the easiest to get wrong. The pattern is trivially regular, which means every error compounds across the wall: a bevel that is too uniform, grout that is too clean, a tile face that is too flat. Real glazed brick tile has slight dishing across each face, tiny variations in glaze pooling at the edges, and a grout line that is neither perfectly straight nor evenly coloured. This collection covers classic white bevelled tile, coloured glazed brick, crackle-glaze stock, and stacked and herringbone layouts.

License

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

• Classic bevelled white — the standard running-bond layout with a chamfered edge that catches a hard highlight. Bathrooms, kitchens, transit station interiors.
• Coloured glazed brick — saturated glaze with visible pooling and thickness variation across the face. Bars, cafes, feature walls, retail interiors.
• Crackle glaze — fine craze network across the glaze layer with the body colour showing through. Period interiors, restored buildings, artisan-look surfaces.
• Stacked and herringbone — alternative layouts of the same tile format, changing the rhythm without changing the material. Modern kitchens, hotel bathrooms, entryways.

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

Where subway tile is used

Architectural visualization. Kitchen and bathroom interiors where the tile wall usually occupies a large fraction of frame and any tiling artefact is immediately visible.

Game environments. Subway stations, public toilets, hospitals and butcher shops — tile is shorthand for institutional or clinical space, and grime on tile is shorthand for neglect.

Film and television set extension. Extending practical tiled sets where the digital portion has to match a photographed wall exactly.

Interior design presentation. Material boards and layout comparisons where the same tile is shown in running bond, stacked and herringbone.

How to use these in Blender

1. Feed the colour map into Base Color, and use the height map through a Bump node for the grout recess rather than displacement — the depth is only a few millimetres and displacement is wasted geometry here.
2. Drive Roughness from the supplied map so the glaze stays near 0.1 while the grout sits above 0.7; a single roughness value across both destroys the material read instantly.
3. Add a small Coat Weight on the glazed variants so the reflection sits above the pigment rather than in it.
4. Use a large Mapping node scale that keeps individual tiles at their real-world size — subway tile is a known dimension, and viewers notice when it is wrong.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Import with sRGB on for colour and off for height, roughness and any masks, then set Metallic to 0 and Specular to 0.5.
2. Use the grout mask to drive a dirt layer that darkens only the recessed lines; on real tile the grout is always the first thing to discolour.
3. Keep normal intensity moderate and let the bevel highlight come from the normal map rather than from geometry — modelled bevels on a tile wall are almost never worth the triangles.
4. For large walls, add a subtle low-frequency colour variation mask across tile faces so the regular pattern does not read as a repeating stamp.

How to use these in Unity

1. Use URP/Lit with a smoothness map rather than a constant, so glaze and grout separate correctly.
2. Set the tiling values from real-world dimensions using a script or a fixed material convention; eyeballing tile scale is the most common source of wrong-looking tiled walls.
3. Bake a Reflection Probe in the room — glazed tile is reflective enough that flat ambient lighting makes it look like painted board.
4. Enable Detail Maps with a fine noise at high tiling to add micro-variation to the glaze at close range.

Tips for subway tile specifically

Attack the regularity. The pattern is machine-perfect, so all your believability has to come from what sits on top of it: uneven grout colour, a slightly darker tile here and there, a chipped corner, soap scum in a corner. Without that, a technically correct tile wall still looks synthetic.

Get the bevel highlight right. On real bevelled tile the chamfer produces a bright line along one edge and a dark line along the opposite, determined by light direction. If your normal map produces the same highlight on all four edges, the bevel is being read as an outline rather than a cut, and the wall flattens.

Let the grout carry the story. Grout is porous and absorbs everything — water stains, mould, cleaning product, rust from fittings. Ageing a tile wall almost entirely through the grout lines, while leaving the glaze relatively clean, is both more accurate and cheaper than dirtying the whole surface.

Browse the collection

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

View the full Tile collection →

Related: Wall textures, Stone textures.