Material from Photo

A photo of a surface already holds most of what a material needs, just mixed together. This pulls it apart: light and dark variation becomes a rough height guess, the slope of that height becomes a normal map, fine detail drives roughness, and the creases become ambient occlusion.

These are guesses, not measurements. A photo cannot tell you what is dark paint and what is shadow. Treat the output as a starting set and tune it: fix the height contrast with Levels, scale the normals with Normal Strength, make it repeat with Seamless Maker. Flat, evenly lit, straight-on photos give much better results.

What kind of photo works best?

Even, overcast style light, shot straight at the surface, in focus, with no bright highlights or cast shadows. Lighting baked into the photo is the single biggest cause of bad output.

Is this like Substance B2M?

Same kind of tool: one image in, a set of PBR maps out. This one runs in your browser and is aimed at getting something usable quickly, not at replacing an authoring package.

Will the result tile?

Not on its own. Run it through Seamless Maker, then check it in the Tiling Checker.

Related: Seamless Maker · Height to Normal · Levels

All tools

Edge Padding: Bleed UV island colors outward into empty space so textures stop showing dark seams at lower mip levels. Runs in your browser.

ORM Packer: Combine ambient occlusion, roughness and metallic maps into a single packed RGBA texture, with control over which map goes in which channel.

Tiling Checker: Preview a texture tiled 3x3 with the seams highlighted, plus a half-offset view, so visible edges and obvious repetition show up before the asset ships.

Material Preview: Preview albedo, normal and ORM maps together on a lit sphere or cube, without exporting into Unreal or Unity to check how a material looks.

Height to Normal: Convert a height, bump or displacement map into a tangent space normal map, with adjustable strength and a choice of DirectX or OpenGL output.

Combine Normals: Layer a detail normal map over a base one and keep the detail from both, instead of averaging them into something flatter than either.

Normal Strength: Scale how much a normal map bends the light, without rebaking it. Keeps the map valid instead of breaking it the way a contrast slider would.

Levels: Set the black point, white point, midtones and inversion of a roughness, AO, height or mask texture, with a live preview.

Flip Green: Invert the green channel of a normal map to switch it between DirectX and OpenGL, which fixes normals that light inside out.

Rough ↔ Gloss: Convert a roughness map to glossiness or smoothness and back, for assets moving between engines that expect one or the other.

Renormalize: Restore a normal map after resizing, blurring or compression has weakened it, without changing which way any of it points.

Seamless Maker: Turn a photo or texture into one that repeats cleanly, by shifting it by half and blending the mismatched edges away.

AO & Curvature: Get ambient occlusion, curvature and cavity maps out of a normal map, with no high-poly mesh and no baker, for edge wear and dirt masks.

Channel Split: Split a packed ORM, RMA or mask texture back into one grayscale map per channel, exported individually or as a zip.