25 Best Free 3D Models Sites

3D models are almost everywhere! As you know, today 3D models are used not only in movie industry, for creating cartoons, for computer and video games, but also they are widely used in medicine, architecture and other important spheres of humans’ life. So there is no doubt that sites where you can download 3D models for free sometimes can be very handy. And that is why to your attention we would like to present a collection of sites where you can easily find and download 3D models for any occasions! Hope you’ll find it useful!
Note: Some of these 3D models are not allowed for commercial usage because of the limited rights, so we strongly recommend you to check the rights before using any of these models in business projects.

3dexport.com

One of the best shops for selling 3d models. It has a large database of only high quality content, user-friendly interface, support for conversion of models in various formats – all this makes 3dexport.com extremely attractive to users.The site has a fairly large selection of free patterns – just use the price filter in the search parameters.

Turbosquid.com

TurboSquid was founded in 2000 to serve the 3D model industry. There are more than 7000 free models in different formats on this site.

3dtotal.com

One of the oldest 3D portals. On this site you can find free models in free stuff section.

Fallingpixel.com

American shop for selling 3d content. The site has a pretty impressive collection of free models.

The3dstudio.com

The market leader in sales of 3d models, along with turbosquid. Has an extensive database of models among which there is a large amount of free content.

3dm3.com

The site has existed since 2001. At the moment it is one of the largest 3D portals where you can always find the latest news, tutorials, and of course free models.

Archive3d.net

A collection of resources consists of more than 15 000 free models. Downloading the content does not require registration

Google 3D Warehouse

The Google 3D Warehouse is a free, online repository where you can find, share, store, and collaborate on 3D models. The easiest way to share your model of a place with the millions of Google Earth users is to upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse.

3dxtras.com

On this site you’ll find more than 9000 free 3d models. Downloading the content requires registration.

3dmodelfree.com

All models on the site are in 3ds format. Downloading content does not require registration.

Dlegend.com

On the site of this design studio you can download 3dmodels without registration.

Artist-3d.com

Graphic design digital art media exchange directory of non-commercial 3ds models.

Nasa.gov

Here you’ll find a growing collection of 3D models, textures, and images from inside NASA. All of these resources are free to download and use.

Exchange3d.com

In the gallery of this store you will find a small collection of free models in various formats.

Mr-cad.com

Mr. Furniture is an exclusive collection of 3D furniture models from Mr. CAD, a group of enthusiastic 3D and architectural design professionals. Our effort has been to create the largest collection of professional quality 3D models. These models are created so that they can be instantly used in any rendering or a 3D scene, thereby becoming immensely time-saving for any professional designer or an architect.

Sharecg.com

Great collection of shared free 3d models. Downloading the content requires registration .

3delicious.net

Delicious free 3d models.

Cg-files.com

On this site you will find many qualitative models. Downloading does not require registration.

Top3d.net

Another shop that sells models. Here you can find a large number of free content.

Oyonale.com

Some free OBJ models..

Dmi-3d.net

Collection of free car 3d models.

Renderlight.it

Free collections of 3D modeling, shaders, textures and materials, tutorials to know the procedures to get high quality render images and animations and more.

Kit3dmodels.com

On the site of this design studio you can download a small amount of furniture models without registration.

3d-auto-club.blogspot.com

Another one collection of free car 3d models.

Model3d.biz

More than 480 3d models in free section.

VFX in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

The mermaids were enhanced by a new ILM facial system that decomposes expressions into individual shapes and a new application of Imocap. Images © Disney Enterprises Inc.

For Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Industrial Light & Magic got to play in the water with mermaids, the Fountain of Youth and shrunken ships in bottles for 300 vfx shots. It was certainly a departure from the crustacean-like creatures and apocalyptic mayhem of the previous Pirates trilogy.
And for Ben Snow, ILM's visual effects supervisor, it was a nice change of pace from the hard surface challenges of the Iron Man franchise. The mermaids were especially different, appearing beautiful and human outside the water to entice and entrap the pirate victims and then menacing underwater with deadly fangs. But rather than going completely CG, they decided to apply a hybrid approach, in keeping with director Rob Marshall's glam aesthetic and desire to retain as much of the live-action performance as possible, particularly when it came to the hero mermaid, Syrena, played by Astrid Berges-Frisbey.
"The look of the mermaids was important," Snow says. "We conceived them as having an inner body that had all the scale texture on them and then an outer membrane that made them look human when they got out of the water. They evolved from being a little more human to a little more creature-like with vestigial gills, but we pulled back on that.

The fin was made more elegant by being proportionally larger than the actress' legs.

"It's a different performance capture challenge," he adds. "In this case, we had to take the scales and match them to the actual bodies and so it was a much more sheer transformation. We came up with new techniques and new tracking costume designs to help automate that: a nice smooth blend of an abdomen to a tail. Or put scales up on arms or faces. Briefly, you see transformations, so we had to match facial performances as well. So we came up with some facial tools."
 According to Tim Harrington, ILM's animation supervisor, the facial capture was driven by two Mova Contour sessions: one to create the facial animation rig and another performance session of the actress watching previs or the shot (ADR style) on a monitor.
"Astrid did about 80 different facial expressions and we have a new proprietary system at ILM where we can take a group of expressions and decompose them into all of the individual shapes that create our facial rig," Harrington explains. "We started by creating a 1:1 match of Astrid and it was one of the most accurate digital doubles ever done at ILM. On top of that, we wanted to either be able to do facial MoCap or to animate by hand the way we did Davy. There were some transformation shots where we were just going to copy the performance from the plate, so we needed to have both approaches and a system that could handle both [as a hybrid]. We had a new Imocap set up for her because she was going to be in water and basically nude. We applied markers using a tattoo stencil on her arm instead of the traditional bands of Velcro to capture her upper body. It would then go to animation and we would attach our mermaid to that and animate the tail [designed by Aaron McBride] using her legs as a basis. We came up with a big fin that was long and elegant that could be simulated."

ILM decided on a more dramatic approach to have the ships look like they're frozen in time at the moment of capture.

New tools for water and interaction with the mermaids were also created. "The idea of taking 30 creatures with all this streaming stuff (flowing hair and tendrils), and then running them through a full-on cloth sim was never going to happen," Snow suggests. "We worked out a way to bake all of these simulations into the cycle, and even some simplified simulation tools that the technical directors could run just so we didn't have to use our creature team to do first passes on all these things. And, likewise, we developed a bunch of little library splashes and then a means of plugging those in so that as the mermaids are attacking, they could automatically generate different types of splashes. It was really layers of tools on top of the simulation engines to make them run faster and easier to do.
ILM not only used its PhysBAM fluid sim engine, but it also applied the Plume GPU-accelerated technique developed with NVIDIA for smoke and fire on The Last Airbender. This was used for mist and for overall fast turnaround. ILM also used Houdini and Maya for additional sim help. "It was handy to have automated tools to help the artists and Rob Marshall to read the animation," Snow adds. "If the mermaid was moving in space, looking almost flat shaded, you could more easily buy the hardware render. But if we didn't put the splashes in quickly, it didn't look fast or powerful enough. The water interaction was key to selling the performance, and we learned a lot about getting characters to move through water convincingly. You had to have accurate-looking simulations right out of the box to show that the animation was performing well."
ILM collaborated with Scanline VFX for the triggering of the Fountain of Youth, beginning with a droplet of water running along a leaf, and then when water flows along the walls of the cave to make a portal. However, for a spectacular liquefying death resulting in a nasty skeleton, ILM scrambled to get some extra water sim by adding a whirling effect. There were some rendered surfaces, meta-surfaces for more of a glossy look, different layers of particle sim created with PhysBAM and the simulation tools and some practical water.

Macro photography was used for this surprise appearance by the monkey.

Finally, for the effect of shrinking ships in bottles (including the Black Pearl), this involved setting up simulations in San Francisco by Chris Foreman and then working with Mohen Leo and the Singapore team. They executed most of the shots.
"Initially, we just thought that the ships would be affected by the light in the room that they're in," Snow explains. "But then this idea came to have the ships look like they're frozen in time at the moment of capture: in battle or in a snowstorm in the Arctic or in a storm at sea. The art department made several bottles with real model ships inside. For the wider shots, we replaced our key ones of those and essentially added movement to some of the others. And then as we got closer, they became fully CG. We even played with macro photography on some shots.
"There were a couple of happy accidents where the compositors went over the top with a big explosion. I initially had them hold it back. But I showed Rob Marshall the early take and he requested that we go back to the bigger explosion."

VFX of X-Men:Origin

Getting the refraction and reflection just right was tough so she didn't look like jell-O or a mass of polygons. Courtesy of Fox.

In X-Men: First Class, the origin of the X-Men world is born during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with Charles Xavier/Professor X (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto meeting and becoming friends and rivals. The VFX challenge was to visually convey the nascent super powers in exciting and diverse ways, including Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Emma Frost (January Jones) and the supper baddie, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).
John Dykstra, a legend in the VFX world, of course, is no stranger to comic superheroes (Spider-Man). But, as the visual effects designer, he was faced with some new challenges in turning out 1,150 shots: time and budgetary constraints and collaborating with global vendors (among them Digital Domain, Rhythm & Hues, MPC, Cinesite, Weta Digital, Method Studios and Luma Pictures).
"We had a very collapsed schedule," Dykstra concedes. "It was slightly less than a year and I've never done anything like that before (Spider-Man was frequently two years). It was a unique experience for me and I had my misgivings about it, but I really liked [director] Matthew Vaughn's irreverent approach to Kick-Ass. And one of the things I think that the superhero genre lacks is the ability to poke fun at itself. The characters are self-deprecating and I love the whole idea of it being the '60s. When he talked to me initially, he said he wanted it to have the feeling of a James Bond film, and I think it does. We shot in England in the wintertime, and, of course, this is an iconic American film, so the challenge was to find environments that either echoed the American environment feeling or that could be enhanced to look as though the stuff was shot here. The idea also was not to make a movie that looked like it was shot in the '60s…"

Shaw is quite the energy absorber and V-ray and rendering out of the box proved instrumental.

Dykstra got the most creative pleasure out of helping come up with the look of the iconic super powers. "In an odd way, it's like a poem: it wants to capture the essence of what the power is in a simple visual term that everybody can understand," he suggests. "Of course, some are cooler than others, so we ended up creating a very broad range of visual options for these characters, mostly in illustrations, and then we picked through the images we thought were most representative of the powers and who the characters were supposed to be.
"The most challenging thing was to come up with a range of super powers that didn't overlap each other hugely and that we could execute smoothly using Matthew's preference for original photography. We were also constrained by time in terms of preparing things from scratch."

For Shaw, the idea was to convey his ability to absorb energy like a big battery and then unleash it. All of Shaw's scenes were handled by Digital Domain, which principally focused on animating Shaw and handling certain CG environments such as the atrium and mirror room. DD's team consisted of Jay Barton (vfx supervisor), Nikos Kalaitzidis (digital effects supervisor), Bernd Angerer (animation supervisor), Brian Gazdik (effects animation supervisor) and Dan Platt (character modeling lead).
Not surprisingly, the technique for creating CG humans on this one was different from both Benjamin Button and Clu: "We only had a few months to do 100 shots," Kalaitzidis suggests. "We used witness cams so all the animation had to be done by hand for Kevin's performance, and he has quite a distinctive walk and swagger. The mirror room was shot on greenscreen and we had to recreate this digital environment with animated versions of Shaw and Magneto as well as CG body doubles to reflect in the mirrors infinitely. In the past, we used mental ray for CG heads, but here we switched to Vray because we had a lot of motion blur and reflections in the mirrors, so we wanted a renderer that could utilize both.

For Mystique, the scales are slightly longer and transformation showier.

"With Kevin Bacon's head and face, we tried to do all the look dev within the final render, within lighting itself, and then do most of the tweaks in compositing when it came to the reflections," he continues. "So we knew we had to do this out of the box immediately."
For Mystique, Rhythm & Hues (under the supervision of Greg Steele) took her transition to a more sophisticated level, according to Dykstra. "In an odd way, the conceit is that when Mystique was younger she did this transformation in a slightly different way: the scales being slightly longer and the transformation being slightly showier than when she became the more mature Rebecca."
Rhythm & Hues also did Angel's wings (modeled after a dragon fly); however, Emma Frost, which posed another significant challenge. Dykstra says they made her like a faceted crystal as opposed to a piece of glass. "That was tough getting the refraction and reflection just right, and the sharpness of the edges so she was able to move without looking like she was made of jell-o or the polygon model of a human being. It's all algorithms: figuring out how much refraction to mix in, how much reflection to include and how much world noise to include as these facets adjust relative to one another for her to be able to move."
Meanwhile, Havok (Lucas Till) required a particular character arc to his light effect, which was done by Luma Pictures (supervised by Vince Cirelli). "He learns how to master its execution which starts out as rings that go in all directions like a light bulb," Dykstra adds.

Beast was a cameo with greater impact without dwelling on his wolf-like transformation.

Then there's Beast (Nicholas Hoult), which was created by MPC (under the supervision of Nicolas Aithadi). The thing that was unique about it was the lack of time spent studying the transformation," Dykstra offers. And that was Matthew's choice: he chose to make it much more of a cameo. And I think that was successful. Frankly, we've seen those kinds of things happened and a very smart choice on his part."
And what's the big take away on this X-Men prequel?
"There's good news and bad news," Dykstra suggests. "The good news is that we succeeded and I'm proud of the work; the bad news is that we succeeded, which means it will be the standard for how these movies will be made. We were very, very fortunate. We had a director willing to give us responsibility and to trust us to provide him with what he needed, and that decision-making process was collapsed. I hope this doesn't become the norm, but, having said that, I'm sure this will become the norm."