Free low poly asset packs, compared

Part of Free low poly assets for Godot

There are four free sources that between them cover most of what a low poly game needs, a few more worth knowing, and a paid tier above them. This is what each is, what its licence allows, and what it is best for. It is the sources half of free low poly assets for Godot; getting one in is the Godot import article, and putting a thousand of them down is the forest article.

Kenney

The largest free library and the most consistent. Hundreds of kits, nature, city, dungeon, space, vehicles, characters, all in one clean geometric style with a shared palette texture, all CC0: no credit, no conditions, commercial use fine. Formats are GLB, OBJ and FBX per kit, with the palette PNG. Best for: starting a project, prototyping a whole scene, and any game whose art can be Kenney's look. The limit is that the look is Kenney's, and everyone knows it.

Quaternius

Large themed packs, nature, animals, characters, weapons, made with care, and CC0. Formats are FBX, OBJ and GLB, and many packs come with animations for the characters. The nature packs are the strongest free source of trees and rocks in a stylised look. Best for: environments and creatures with a consistent, slightly softer style than Kenney's.

KayKit

Kits with a hand-painted flavour, dungeon and adventure themed, CC0, in GLB and FBX, several made with Godot in mind and shipped as Godot scenes. Smaller in number than the two above but distinctive. Best for: a fantasy game that should not look like a Kenney game.

Poly Pizza

Not a maker but a search engine over free models from many authors, mostly CC0 with some CC BY, downloadable as GLB and OBJ, with a preview in the browser. Thousands of individual models rather than kits, so styles vary between them. Best for: the one thing a kit did not have. Check the licence on each model, and give credit where it is CC BY.

The others

Sketchfab has a large free section under various Creative Commons licences, downloadable in glTF; quality and style vary enormously.
OpenGameArt is older and broader, with licences to check per item.
itch.io hosts many small free packs, often CC0, searchable by tag; low poly and trees are well covered.
The Unity Asset Store and Godot Asset Library have free entries, tied to their engine's format and terms.
Blender's Sapling add-on and a dozen tree generators make trees rather than supplying them; most make high-poly ones by default.

The paid tier

Synty sells the POLYGON series, the packs that defined the commercial low poly look: large, consistent, with dozens of palette variants per kit, and priced per pack. KitBash3D and others sell at a higher tier. Paid packs solve the problem of scale, hundreds of matching pieces, and create the problem of sameness: the POLYGON look is in a great many games.

The sameness problem

Every pack, free or paid, is the same models in every game that uses it. Players notice, reviewers mention it, and a game built from a well-known kit looks like a prototype however good it is. The usual answers are to recolour, to mix packs, and to modify the models in Blender, all of which take time.

The other answer is to build the model instead of downloading it. PolyMason's tree builder makes a tree to your measurements, in a species' own proportions, with your colours, and nobody else has it; it exports OBJ with a palette texture, in metres, flat-shaded, with levels of detail and the tree's other states. It is free and it is one tree at a time, which suits a game that needs its trees to be its own and its crates to be anybody's.

Which to use

For a whole scene fast: Kenney. For nature with more character: Quaternius. For fantasy with a painted feel: KayKit. For a single missing prop: Poly Pizza. For the trees, and anything you want to be yours: build them. And whichever you pick, keep to one palette texture convention across them, so the scene is one material rather than five.