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Provenance & license hygiene

Free directories are useful — and a common place for license laundering: copyrighted AAA/ripped content re-uploaded as “CC0 / free for commercial use.” Downstream users can still be liable even if they acted in good faith.

Trust signals (prefer these)

  • Long-running creators with a public brand (e.g. Kenney, Kay Lousberg / KayKit)
  • Official institutional dumps (e.g. Smithsonian Open Access)
  • Licenses hosted on the creator’s own site or well-known registries
  • Clear version history / changelog for packs

Red flags

  • Anonymous uploads of large, high-fidelity “AAA-looking” bundles labeled CC0
  • Licenses that only appear in a forum post, not on the download page
  • “Free for commercial use” with no named license text
  • Assets that look ripped from a known commercial game or engine sample without provenance
  • FiveM / GTA V “prop packs,” leaked MLOs, or GTA5-Mods dumps labeled CC0 (see fivem.md)

Paper trail (recommended for production)

For every external pack you ship, keep:

Field Example
Source URL https://kenney.nl/assets/industrial-kit
Creator Kenney
License CC0 1.0
Download date 2026-07-19
Snapshot Screenshot or archived copy of the listing page

This catalog’s frontmatter (url, license, verified, status) is the public version of that registry — not a substitute for your project’s internal notices file.

Practical policy for this repo

  1. Prefer reputable suppliers over “biggest free dump.”
  2. Aggregators stay license: varies / needs-review unless a specific pack is verified.
  3. When provenance is doubtful, do not mark status: active.

One entry equals one pack

This catalog indexes downloadable packs, not publishers. Kenney is twenty entries, Quaternius eight, KayKit six, because a solo dev browsing for “nature kit” or “UI audio” should land on the file they will actually ship. A publisher-level page would hide that.

The cost is concentration: a license change at kenney.nl would require editing every Kenney file. The optional publisher frontmatter field exists so those files can be found together. Do not collapse them into one card, and do not add publisher grouping to the site UI unless a later session explicitly decides to. Do not set publisher to a generic host (GitHub, Hugging Face).

Category boundaries (characters, animation, 2d, tools)

These rules exist so a later pass cannot "grow" a thin category by refiling the same packs.

2d/ holds sprite sheets, including baked animation cycles. A LuizMelo boss sheet is the same job as Pixel Frog or SunnyLand: drop PNG frames into a 2D game. It is not a 3D clip library.

animation/ holds 3D motion you retarget or browse as clips: mocap dumps, Mixamo, Quaternius UAL, KayKit Character Animations, Blender pose libraries. Capture/retarget services stay here when the user's job is "get motion onto a character" (Mixamo, Rokoko Vision, MoveBox).

Runtimes and editors go in tools/. Creature 2D Runtimes is Apache software you ship, same class as Dialogic. It is not an animation pack.

characters/ stays one folder. Use subcategories to split generator (MakeHuman, MPFB, CharMorph, VRoid) from finished library / rigged / creatures packs. The site search already indexes those tags. Splitting into two directories would make "I need a character" two clicks.