A thatched roof of golden straw for the cottages, barns and stables of a medieval village. The straw lies in overlapping layers of rounded bundles; every bundle shows fine stalk grooves and ends in ragged, pointed stalks, and every layer casts a soft shadow on the one below. The colours are painted in flat patches with fresh golden straw, older brown and a few grey weathered bundles; the forms come from a real height map, so the roof reads well from close up and from far away. One texture tile covers 2 x 2 metres and repeats without seams.

In Blender, the included add-on "Stylized Material Generator" generates the material from 44 parameters. Change the number of bundles and layers, how ragged and round the ends are, the stalk grooves, how much the bundles are turned and lifted, and the three straw colours (any colour, e.g. grey old straw or pale reed). Press Generate, and all maps are rebuilt, so the shape and the layout change, not only the colours. Live Preview updates a 512 px version while you drag. Moss can be grown over the roof with one slider. Export writes ready texture sets for Unreal Engine and Unity.

For Unreal Engine and Unity you get the default material as texture sets at 2048 and 1024 px with the packed maps each engine expects (Unreal: ORM and DirectX normal; Unity: .unitypackage with URP and Built-in materials).

What is included

• Blender: Stylized Material Generator add-on (Blender 4.2+, tested in 5.2), material library with slider node group (scale, offset, rotation, colour, edges, roughness), showcase scene ready to render
• Unreal Engine: Base Color, Normal (DirectX), ORM, Height, Masks at 2048 and 1024 px
• Unity: .unitypackage with URP Lit and Built-in Standard materials and a demo scene
• All maps as PNG in both normal map conventions

This material is part of the Stylized Medieval Village Materials pack.

Texture origin

Every texture is generated procedurally by our own Python generator in Blender (no texture libraries, no scans, no AI image generators). Preview lighting uses the CC0 HDRI Studio Small 09 from Poly Haven (not included).

Licence: the add-on code is GPL, the textures and materials are royalty free for your projects.

Designed with Claude, made procedurally in Blender and Python, art directed and checked by a 3D artist.