Creating PBR materials

Physically Based Rendering is an excellent shading technique that gives modders the ability to create amazing photorealistic maps. However, the creation process for PBR materials is much different from that of standard Source materials, and many modders new to the PBR workflow may not know how to create them. This article will review the process of creating a PBR material.

Overview

A PBR material consists of 3 main files:

• A Diffuse (base) texture
• A Normal map (optionally with a Height map embedded in the Alpha channel
• A MRAO map, containing information on the Metalness and Roughness data as well as Ambient Occlusion

While the Diffuse and Normal map textures may already be part of the standard Source texture workflow, the MRAO map may present some difficulty to create, as standard image editing programs do not have ways to create the textures needed to make an MRAO texture. Modeling programs, such as Blender, and image-to-texture programs, such as Materialize can create such materials. Creating a MRAO map