I've tested a lot of materials in Nomad Sculpt. Free packs, paid packs, hand-built presets. After 248+ projects, here's what I actually use and what's worth paying for.
What comes built in
Nomad Sculpt ships with basic material presets. Solid colors with roughness and metallic sliders. No texture maps. Fine for blocking out ideas, but limited for anything you want to render properly.
The built-in matcaps are useful for sculpting (they show form well) but they don't render into final images. For finished work, you need PBR materials with proper texture maps.
Free PBR materials
ambientCG.com is the best free source. CC0 license, proper PBR channel maps (color, roughness, metallic, normal). Download a set, load each channel manually in Nomad Sculpt's material menu.
Polyhaven is another good option. Same quality, same manual setup process.
The trade-off: free materials work, but you set up each one manually. Load four texture files per material, adjust scale, save the preset. For one or two materials, that's fine. For a full library, it adds up.
Paid material packs
A good material pack gives you ready-to-use presets. All channels mapped, correct PBR values, proper scale. Apply one, done.
The Smart Materials Pack I built has 64 materials: metals, wood, stone, fabric, organic, and specials like carbon fiber and ice. 4K textures for hero objects, 1K versions for background elements. I use these across almost every project.
Free vs paid: honest take
If you're learning and experimenting, free materials from ambientCG are enough. You'll learn how PBR channels work by setting them up manually.
If you're creating finished renders regularly, a material pack saves real time. Not because the quality is drastically different, but because you skip the setup. Apply material, adjust scale, render. That workflow difference matters over dozens of projects.
What to look for in any material
Four channels minimum: color, roughness, metallic, normal. Without the normal map, surfaces look flat. Without proper metallic values, metals don't reflect correctly.
Resolution matters for close-up renders. 4K for hero objects, 1K or 2K for anything in the background. Don't use 4K everywhere; it eats iPad memory.
Tileable textures. If the material has visible seams when applied to a large surface, it's not production-ready. Triplanar mapping helps hide seams, but the texture itself should tile cleanly.
About the Creator
nebenzu is run by Ben, a Munich-based designer and 3D artist with a community of 128,000+ followers across Instagram, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, and X, focused on Nomad Sculpt workflows. The courses come from years of daily work in Nomad Sculpt, creating 3D typography, materials, and visual experiments.
You can find free tutorials and behind-the-scenes content on the nebenzu YouTube channel and Instagram.
