What's a good source of free seamless textures and bump maps for use with Maya and other 3D modeling programs?

Answer 1

Google Images with the word "Tiling" usually gives decent results for basic textures needed (ex: Dirt Tiling).

There are loads of sites such as Textures.com that give free textures.

You can also create your own texture pretty easily in Photoshop or similar programs. I'll explain an example using Photoshop on a 1K (1024 x 1024) texture

1. Find a large image of what you want to tile. A large image of dirt usually blends nicely. Now take a 1K texture size chunk out of that image
2. With the 1K texture loaded go to Filter>Other>Offset
3. Offset half of the texture in both directions. In this case it would be 512
4. Now there is a very visible seam in the center of the image both vertical and horizontal, now we fix that seam using either the Spot Heal tool or the Clone Stamp brush

You now have a personal 1K tiling texture no one else will have or have seen