Not everyone is an illustrator, and that's okay. The internet is full of generous creators who share high-quality vector assets for free. The key is finding files that are "clean"—meaning closed paths and no messy overlaps—so they extrude perfectly in Vextrude.
1. SVGRepo
Best For: Everything
Over 500,000+ open-licensed vectors.
SVGRepo is arguably the best resource for 3D modelers. Why? Because most of their icons are "monocolor" paths, which means they are usually single, solid shapes. This makes them perfect for extrusion without any cleanup.
2. Simple Icons
Best For: Brand Logos
Thousands of popular brands (Twitter, Facebook, etc).
Need to make a 3D Facebook logo or a YouTube play button? Simple Icons provides canonical, color-coded SVGs for almost every popular brand. The geometry is always optimized and clean.
3. Undraw
For more complex scenes, Undraw offers open-source illustrations. While these are more complex, you can often ungroup them in a vector editor and extrude specific layers (like a character or a background element) to create a "diorama" effect.
4. Feather Icons
If you are designing 3D user interfaces or physical buttons, Feather Icons is the industry standard for minimalism. The strokes are consistent, which means if you convert strokes to paths, you get uniform thickness perfect for 3D printing.
5. Google Fonts (Icons)
Formerly Material Icons, this massive library offers thousands of consistent symbols. They are perfect for 3D printing functional signage (like "Restroom", "Exit", or "Warning" signs).
"Free" Covers Four Different Things
The word does a lot of work on download pages, and the differences matter the moment money is involved.
- CC0 / public domain. No conditions. Use, modify, sell, no credit required. The only genuinely frictionless option.
- CC-BY. Free including commercially, but attribution is mandatory — and it means naming the creator and the licence somewhere a user can find, not a link buried in your source.
- CC-BY-SA. Attribution plus share-alike: derivative works must carry the same licence. Fine for a personal print, awkward for a product.
- "Free for personal use." Not an open licence at all. Selling anything made from it requires buying a separate licence.
The trap is that a single site often mixes all four. Repositories that aggregate from multiple sources set the licence per asset, not per site, so the terms you read on the homepage may not apply to the file you downloaded.
Brand Logos Are a Separate Problem
This catches people who did everything else right. Icon sets that collect company logos typically release the SVG files under a permissive licence — but the licence covers the file, not the mark drawn in it.
Trademark law is independent of copyright. A brand logo stays a trademark regardless of who redrew it or how it was licensed, so selling keyrings of a car manufacturer's badge is a trademark problem even when the SVG was CC0. Simple Icons states this explicitly in its own terms, and it applies to every similar collection.
Personal use — a print for your own desk — is a different situation from stocking an online shop. If you are selling, use marks you own or have written permission for.
Not Every Free SVG Extrudes Well
Most icon libraries are drawn for screens at 24 pixels, and that shapes them in ways that fight 3D:
- Stroke-based icons. Feather and similar sets are outlines with no fill. There is no enclosed area to extrude until you expand the strokes to paths.
- Hairline detail. A 1-pixel gap scales to well under a nozzle width at keyring size. The features merge in the slicer and the icon becomes a blob.
- Overlapping shapes. Fine on screen, since you only see the union. In 3D each shape becomes a separate solid with walls buried inside the mesh.
- Auto-traced illustrations. Editorial artwork of the undraw variety often carries thousands of nodes describing smooth curves, producing needlessly heavy meshes.
Solid, filled, chunky icons convert best — the kind drawn for large sizes rather than toolbar use.
Quick test:
Open the SVG and turn every fill off. Whatever disappears will not extrude. If the whole icon vanishes, it is stroke-based and needs expanding first.
Verifying Before You Sell
Three habits prevent nearly every licensing problem, and none takes more than a minute.
Save the licence with the file. When you download an asset, save a text file next to it recording the source URL, the licence, the creator and the date. Two years later, "I think it was CC0" is not a defence, and the page may have changed.
Check the asset page, not the site. On aggregators, the licence is stated per file. Assume nothing from the homepage.
When it is genuinely unclear, draw it. A simple geometric mark takes twenty minutes in Inkscape, and something you made carries no ambiguity at all. For lettering, generating 3D text from a font you have licensed sidesteps the question entirely.