Common PBR Texture Tools and Maps

While creating procedural materials using nodes can result in a wide variety of realistic materials, they are not everyone's cup of tea. In addition, they aren't easily transferable to other 3D software because typically, nodes are application-specific. However, there is a solution that is not only easier for texture artists to understand, but will also have the advantage of working in any application that uses physically-based renderers (or, PBR for short).

PBR Texturing Tools

There are several applications that allow you to create PBR textures that emulate real-world materials very accurately. While many of them allow you to create tileable PBR texture sets, the following three also allow you to create physically accurate textures for UV-mapped objects:

Substance Painter: One of the most widely used PBR texture applications, this product is available by subscription at the Substance by Adobe website. You can download a 30-day trial at https://www.substance3d.com/download/.
- Subscribing to Substance also gives you access to the full Substance suite, which includes Substance Painter, Substance Alchemist, Substance Designer, and Substance Source. Substance Designer is a node-based material authoring tool that you can use to create tileable PBR textures that you can export as bitmaps.
- There are thousands of physically accurate materials available on Substance Source, with the subscription allowing 30 free downloads per month.
- If you are a member of the Steam community you can also purchase Substance Painter on that site, but it does not include access to Substance Source.
3D Coat: In addition to offering features such as digital sculpting, UV Mapping, and strong retopologizing tools, 3D Coat offers PBR painting tools that are easy and fun to use. You can download a 30-day trial at https://3dcoat.com/download/. Permanent licenses are available for purchase.
ArnorPaint: A reasonably-priced alternative to PBR texture creation, with features that are similar to those of Substance Painter. You can download the application at https://armorpaint.org/

Spec-Gloss vs. Metal-Rough Workflow

There are two basic PBR workflows available for most PBR authoring tools.

Spec-Gloss	Map Type	Metal-Rough
Base color with no shadow or highlight information. Ambient occlusion can be baked into the map, however it is recommended that RGB values fall between 30 and 240.	Diffuse (aka Color or Albedo) Set Gamma to 2.2	Base color with no shadow or highlight information. Ambient occlusion can be baked into the map, however it is recommended that RGB values fall between 30 and 240.
Not used. See Glossiness below.	Roughness Set Gamma to 1.0	A grayscale image. Black (0) creates very smooth, shiny surfaces. White (1) creates rough and broad highlights. Typically used to create wear such as scratches, fingerprints, smudges, etc.
Not used. See Specular below.	Metallic Set Gamma to 1.0	A grayscale image. Black (0) is non-metallic. White (1) is metallic. There can be transitional grayscale values that indicate dirt or wear that covers the metal.
A grayscale image that defines the reflectance information for both metallic and non-metallic surfaces.	Specular Set Gamma to 1.0	The Roughness map (described above) determines the amount of shininess. Specular (highlight) color is defined by the Specular input in the Physical Surface node, or the Specular Tint color in the Cycles Principled BSDF node.
A grayscale image. Black (0) values create rough and broad highlights, and white (1) values create smooth, shiny surfaces. Basically the inverse of a roughness map. Typically used to create wear such as scratches, fingerprints, smudges, etc.	Glossiness Set Gamma to 1.0	Not used. See Roughness above.

Other Common Maps used in PBR Materials

Map Type	Description
Bump Set Gamma to 1.0	A grayscale map that determines which areas in a material are raised or lowered. Darker areas are recessed. Lighter areas are raised. The effect is prominent in surfaces that directly face the camera, but faces that are perpendicular to the camera appear flat.
Displacement Set Gamma to 1.0	Similar to a bump map in that it is a grayscale map that determines which areas in a material are raised or lowered. Darker areas are recessed. However, unlike a Bump map, geometry is displaced according to the grayscale values in the map. At present, the FireFly renderer uses micropoly displacement properly. To use displacement maps in SuperFly, the geometry has to be subdivided by a sufficient amount to create a sufficient number of polygons to displace.
Normal (Tangent Space) Set Gamma to 1.0	A blue-toned image that works similarly to a bump map, except that it uses RGB information to correspond with XYZ axes in 3D space. The RGB information tells Poser how to orient the surface normal for each polygon in 3D space. Normal maps used in Poser should be OpenGL (not DirectX). If it appears that your normal maps are indenting areas that should be raised, you can take the normal map into an application such as Photoshop and invert the Green channel of the normal map.
Transparency/Opacity Set Gamma to 1.0	A grayscale image that defines opaque and transparent areas. Black (0) is fully transparent, and white (1) is fully opaque.
Emission Set Gamma to 1.0	A grayscale image that defines areas that emit light or glow. Black (0) produces no emission. White (1) areas are fully emissive. PoserSurface: Plug Emissive map into Ambient Value, and set color in Ambient Color. PhysicalSurface: Plug Emissive map into EmissionStrength. Set Emission color in Emission. PrincipledBSDF: Plug Emissive map into Emission. Emission color can either be set in the Color map, or by mixing the Emissive map with the desired Emission color and connecting that to the Principled node.