Materialize is a great way of making PBR maps using only a Diffuse (colour) image as a base, this tutorial will teach you how to make a full PBR texture with Normals, Roughness, AO and a height Map. This will also teach you how to make it seamless using the Splat technique.
> Importing the Diffuse Map
First I’ll import my Diffuse Map, which is a stone image I took from Google.
You’ll want to click “O” which stands for “open”.
A new file explorer window will open and you’ll want to navigate where your image is stored, once you find it and click it it’ll look like this:
> Creating the Height Map
We first have to create a Height Map, you’ll want to click “create” in the Height Map rectangle.
Your material will turn half Diffuse and half Height Map, you really don’t want to mess too much with the equalizer settings because they’re kinda complicated, so just use the presets. For Normal Maps you want to choose either Displace or Default. Details can work sometimes but it becomes an eye sore. I’ll use Displace for this texture because it’s already very crisp.
After messing with your menu you want to click Set as Height Map down here:
NOTE:
When we’re working with Height Maps things that are brighter are closer to the camera and things that are darker are far away from the camera, if you want your material to invert that you want to mess with final contrast (don’t push the slider too far or else it’ll look weird)
To see how our material looks like we’ll click Show Full Material and if you’ve done everything correctly it’ll look 3D with Displacements.
I don’t normally work with displacements when I’m using Normals in Materialize so we’ll grab the “Paralax Displacement” slider and slide it all the way to zero.
> Creating the Normal Map
Now go to the Normal Map rectangle and click on the Create button.
Your texture will turn into a normal map now:
Normal Maps are more complicated, but from what I understand the more contrast it has the stronger it’ll be. For this case I’ll pick the “Crisp” preset because i’m making rocks and they are normally (hehe) very physically rough.
If we click on Show Full Material again we’ll now have the normal map applied to our material.
I’ll not make a metallic map for 2 reasons: Creating metallic maps in Materialize sucks because it creates artifacts that are annoying to fix and because it’s a stone texture. For metallic objects in blender just turn the metallic slider in the Principled BSDF node to 1. If you want to create one you need to know that colours that are closer to white are more metallic and colours that are closer to black are less metallic.
> Creating the Smoothness Map
You mainly want to mess with High Pass Blur Size until it has some contrast to it like this:
Darker images are less rough and lighter images are rougher.
> Creating the AO Map
AO stands for Ambient occlusion and you normally would want to add these to textures that would have variations in depth and many pieces that could occlude light from entering it. Since I’m making a rock texture i’ll make an ao map.
You just want to make it look “right” to your eyes, just mess with all of the values until you’re comfortable with what you’ve made.
And now we have a full material:
Sometimes your material might not be seamless, if that’s the case we have to head to the Tile Maps section.
Since we’re using a rock texture we can make our lives easier and use Technique Splat, and there’s really nothing much to say about it, mess with the value until it looks seamless.
Now click on Set Maps and we’re good to go!
Now just click on Save project after setting the file format to PNG, go to a folder or create a folder using the create folder button and them save all of the maps in there.
> Importing to Blender
This works for any modern version of Blender.
