Creating PBR materials

Template:WIP While most Source games do not support actual PBR materials, some third-party games or engines natively support PBR materials. These games/engines include Strata Source, Hunt Down the Freeman, and the Titanfall branch. Some material creation programs, however, create individual texture maps for the metalness, roughness, ambient occlusion, normal, and height maps. In order for these Source games to read these maps, the metalness, roughness, and ao maps need to be combined into an MRAO texture and, if your selected game supports parallax mapping, the normalmap and heightmap need to be combined into one Bumpmap.

Analysis

A MRAO texture is a texture that puts the Roughness map on the Red channel, the Roughness map on the Blue channel, and the Ambient Occlusion on the blue channel. They are combined into one texture to reduce the space used, but can cause some confusion on how they are created.

Using PBR-2-Source

PBR-2-Source is a very useful program that does all the work of converting a PBR texture to the Source engine. It creates the MRAO texture, the Normal map, the Diffuse map, and the VMT. It uses .PNG image sources.