[Wood] Charred Textures

Charred wood is one of the hardest surfaces to fake by hand. Fire does not burn evenly — it eats the soft spring growth first and leaves the dense summer rings standing, so a burnt plank ends up with a raised, alligator-scaled ridge pattern that no procedural noise node gives you for free. These tiles are shot from real burnt timber, including deliberate shou sugi ban charring used in Japanese exterior cladding.

License

Free for personal and commercial use. No attribution required. Commercial games, film, broadcast, print, client work and product design 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.

Gisang-cheonoe: the idea from beyond the sky

There is a Korean phrase, gisang-cheonoe. Its four characters mean, quite literally, "a strange idea, out past the sky" — a thought so far outside the ordinary that it seems to have arrived from somewhere beyond the edge of the world. It is the wild idea nobody asked for, the one that turns out to work anyway. That is the only thing this library asks of you. Not training. Not a portfolio. Just the idea.

Burnt cedar on a spaceship hull. A charred plank as the backdrop of a menu screen. Nobody is going to stop you.

You do not need to be a professional

Everything described on this page can be done by someone who has never opened a 3D application before. There is no step below that needs a course, a licence, or a colleague looking over your shoulder. Drag an image in, connect it to a colour input, press render. That is the entire skill.

To say it once more, plainly: you do not need to be an expert. Nothing on this page is out of reach for a first-time user.

Everything here is free

Free to download. Free to use in work you are paid for. Free in a game you sell, a film you screen, a product you ship.

Again, all of it, free. No paid tier, no watermark, no sign-up wall, and no credit owed to anyone.

Use it however you want

Recolour it, crop it, stack it, invert it, push it through filters until it stops looking like wood at all. There is no correct use.

Once more: these are yours to use exactly as you want them. The single limit is redistribution — you may not repackage and sell the texture files themselves as a texture pack.

What's in this collection

• Shou sugi ban cladding — deliberately charred cedar, brushed back to a regular grain. Exterior architecture and modern interiors.
• Deep alligator char — heavy burn with wide cracked scales and black crevices. Ruins, burnt-out buildings, forge props.
• Scorched ends — planks burnt at the edges with clean wood still showing in the middle. Campfire scenes and salvage timber.
• Ash-grey burnout — fully spent wood, pale grey, structure barely holding together. Post-fire environments and disaster scenes.

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

Where charred wood is used

Game environments. Burnt villages, collapsed mine supports, and abandoned camps read instantly as "something happened here" without a single prop being added.

Architectural visualisation. Shou sugi ban is a real cladding material with real clients. A charred cedar facade renders far more convincingly from a photographed tile than from a darkened wood shader.

Product and packaging design. Black textured wood behind a bottle or a knife handle carries a craft-workshop association that flat black never does.

Motion and title design. The ridge pattern catches raking light beautifully, so a slow light sweep across a charred plank makes an effective title background on its own.

How to use these in Blender

1. Select your object, open the Shading workspace, and drag the texture file straight into the node editor.
2. Connect the Color output of the new Image Texture node to Base Color on the Principled BSDF.
3. Add a Bump node, feed the same image into its Height input, and connect Normal to the Principled BSDF Normal socket. Set strength around 0.3 to start.
4. Lower Roughness slightly on the charred areas — burnt wood is matte, but the cracked ridges catch a faint sheen.

How to use these in Unreal Engine 5

1. Drag the image file into the Content Browser to import it as a texture.
2. Right-click in the Content Browser and create a new Material, then double-click to open it.
3. Drag the texture into the material graph and connect it to Base Color.
4. Duplicate the node, set the sampler type to Linear Color, and feed it through a Constant multiply into Roughness so the burnt ridges stay dull.

How to use these in Unity

1. Drop the image into your Assets folder — Unity imports it automatically.
2. Create a new Material and set its shader to Standard or URP/Lit.
3. Assign the texture to Albedo, then set Tiling to 2 or 3 so the char pattern reads at scale.
4. Enable Normal Map from the same image using Unity's "Create from Grayscale" option if you want raised ridges without extra maps.

Tips for charred wood specifically

Do not tile charred wood too tightly. The cracked scale pattern is highly recognisable, and a viewer will spot the repeat much faster than they would on plain grain. Two or three repeats across a wall is usually the limit before it starts to look like wallpaper.

Charred surfaces almost never sit in isolation. Real fire leaves a gradient — black at the source, brown in the middle, untouched at the far end. Mixing a charred tile with a natural wood tile through a soft vertical mask sells the scene far more than using char alone.

Keep the roughness high but not flat. Fully matte black reads as plastic. A small amount of variation, driven by the same image fed into a roughness input, restores the mineral glint that burnt wood actually has.

Browse the collection

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

View the full Wood collection →

Related: Ground, Wall.