Since custom textures are finally here for us to play around with, I wanted to share with you all an incredible tool that I don’t think many people know about called Materialize. This 100% free app was even used by the Uncharted collection of games to create several different maps for their textures!
So, let’s get started. After downloading the app, you’ll be greeted with a screen like this:
It doesn’t look too friendly, I know, but it’s fairly simple to get a hang of.
Firstly, you’ll want to get your Diffuse map ready (just your texture image) and click on the ‘O’ button under the Diffuse Map section. When you do that, a menu will pop up. Here, you must find your picture and then select it.
And then, like magic, your image will now appear on the grey block that we saw in the background! Now would be a good time to explain that you can zoom in and out using the scroll wheel, and rotate by holding down the right mouse button. You can also move the block using the Middle Mouse button.
So now that we’re here and we’ve got our diffuse map imported, let’s generate a Height Map in order to then generate the Normal Map. Hit the ‘Create’ button that is no longer translucent under the Height Map section. As you can then see, many options are given to us and you can spend lots of time making the texture perfect for you, but I’m going to use the default settings (or slightly tweaked for best results) here. As for the map, the darker it is, the lower it will appear. Height Reveal Slider defines how much of the (in this instance) Height Map you can see overlayed over our Diffuse.
After tweaking the settings for a very short while, I came up with something that I found good. Continuing on, because we have our height map, we can now generate our normal map. Click on the no longer translucent ‘Create’ button under the Normal Map section and you will be greeted with another, similar window. For some reason, the reveal slider doesn’t do anything here (at least for me). In this setup, I chose the Mids preset for the frequency and gently played about with the shape recognition, rotation, spread and bias sliders.
You can also generate a Metalness Map here following the same method, and some others maps that are currently unsupported in Roblox.
For now, this is all I want to generate. To save, see the very most right part of the top menu titled ‘Saving Options’. I’ll select PNG and then hit Save Project. This will save all of our generated maps. The same menu should pop up as the open menu, and here you should find the folder you want to save to. Make sure to give it a name in the Filename text box, otherwise the Select button won’t be selectable!
And then tada! Like magic, you now have all of your generated maps saved in your selected folder, and a .mtz file that can be used to edit all the maps in the program (via the Load Project) button if you want to make some changes!
After importing, this was my result. Albeit subtle, you can create much harder results if you spend longer!
There are SO MANY more features in this program! If you have an image that doesn’t tile, you can make it tile using the ‘Tile Maps’ button. You will be given tons of options to make the perfect tiling texture from a generic image! The best way to find out is to download it and start using it. I bet you’ll find some features that I didn’t know were in there.
So, in conclusion, Materialize is a fantastic 100% free tool that you can use to create your own PBR textures from scratch, even if they don’t tile, without ever needing an additional program. I’ve gone out and taken pictures using my phone and converted them into textures using this method, and you can too!
Feel free to ask any questions in the replies, I am more than happy to help! Thank you for reading, get out there and make some textures!