Free low poly asset packs, compared

Part of Free low poly assets for Godot

Four free sources between them cover most of what a low poly game needs. There are a few more worth knowing, and a paid tier above them. This article says what each one is, what its license allows, and what it's best for. It's the sources half of free low poly assets for Godot. Getting a model into the engine is in the Godot import article, and putting a thousand of them down is in the forest article.

Kenney

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

Quaternius

Quaternius makes large themed packs of nature, animals, characters and weapons. They're carefully made 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 stylized look. Best for: environments and creatures with a consistent, slightly softer style than Kenney's.

KayKit

These are kits with a hand-painted flavor, themed around dungeons and adventure. They're CC0 and come in GLB and FBX, and several were made with Godot in mind and ship as Godot scenes. There are fewer kits here than from the two above, but the style is distinctive. Best for: a fantasy game that shouldn't look like a Kenney game.

Poly Pizza

Poly Pizza is a search engine over free models from many authors, and it makes none of its own. The models are mostly CC0 with some CC BY, and they download as GLB and OBJ, with a preview in the browser. It has thousands of individual models rather than kits, so styles vary between them. Best for: the one thing a kit didn't have. Check the license on each model, and give credit where it's CC BY.

The others

Sketchfab has a large free section under various Creative Commons licenses, downloadable in glTF. Quality and style vary enormously.
OpenGameArt is older and broader, with licenses 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. They're large and consistent, with dozens of palette variants per kit, and they're priced per pack. KitBash3D and others sell at a higher tier. A paid pack gives you hundreds of matching pieces, which solves the problem of scale. It also brings the problem of sameness, because 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 and reviewers mention it. A game built from a well-known kit looks like a prototype, however good it is. The usual answers are to recolor, to mix packs, or to modify the models in Blender, and all of them 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 and with your colors, so nobody else has the same one. It exports OBJ with a palette texture, in meters, flat-shaded, with levels of detail and the tree's other states. It's free and it makes one tree at a time. That suits a game that wants trees of its own and can take its crates from a pack.

Which to use

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