PBR material workflow guide

A material that looks right in one scene and plastic in the next is almost always breaking a physical rule. Physically-based rendering (PBR) is a set of those rules: describe how a surface actually reflects light, and the renderer can light it correctly anywhere — in a studio setup, outdoors, or in a real-time viewer on a phone.

The two ideas behind PBR

• Energy conservation. A surface never reflects more light than it receives. The smoother the surface, the smaller and brighter the highlight; the rougher it is, the wider and dimmer the highlight becomes.
• Metals and non-metals behave differently. Non-metals (dielectrics) reflect only a small part of the light that hits them head-on — about 4% for most materials — and show their colour through diffuse light. Metals have no diffuse component: their colour lives in the reflection itself.

Everything else in a PBR material is a way of describing those two properties across a surface.

The maps and what they mean

• Base color (albedo) — the surface colour with no lighting, shadow or highlight painted in. Colour data, sRGB.
• Metallic — mostly pure black (dielectric) or pure white (metal). In-between values are for transitions, such as dust or paint over metal. Non-colour data.
• Roughness — the most important map for realism. Fingerprints, wear and scratches live here. Non-colour data.
• Normal — fine surface detail as a tangent-space map. Check the convention: OpenGL (Y+) and DirectX (Y−) normal maps differ in the green channel.
• Ambient occlusion — contact shadows in crevices, applied by the shader rather than painted into the albedo.
• Height, emissive and opacity — only where the surface actually needs them.

Values that keep materials believable

• Keep albedo in a plausible range. For non-metals, stay above roughly sRGB 30–50 at the darkest (charcoal, fresh asphalt) and around 240 at the brightest (fresh snow). Pure black and pure white don’t occur on real surfaces.
• Metal base colours are bright. Raw metals reflect roughly 70–100% of light, which puts their base colour around sRGB 180–255.
• Vary roughness before colour. Real surfaces are rarely uniformly rough; subtle roughness variation sells a material faster than colour noise does.
• Don’t bake lighting into textures. Shadows or highlights painted into the albedo will fight the scene’s lights.

Our workflow, step by step

1. Reference first. Photograph or collect the real material under neutral light, and note how it wears.
2. Clean UVs. Consistent texel density across the object, seams where they won’t be seen, and padding between islands for mipmaps.
3. Bake from the high-poly model. Normal, ambient occlusion, curvature and position maps tell the texturing stage where wear and dirt belong.
4. Build the material in layers. Base material, then variation, then wear and dirt driven by the baked maps — in Substance Painter or directly in Blender’s node editor.
5. Export per target. Offline renderers (V-Ray, Redshift, Octane, Cycles) and real-time engines expect different channel packing and colour spaces; use an export preset per target instead of converting by hand.
6. Check under neutral light. A plain studio HDRI and a grey-ball scene reveal problems that a dramatic hero setup hides.

Colour management matters

Base colour and emissive maps are colour data (sRGB). Metallic, roughness, normal and height maps are non-colour data and must be read as linear. Loading a roughness map as sRGB is one of the most common reasons a material looks “off” without an obvious cause. Render through a proper view transform — AgX or ACES — so bright highlights roll off naturally instead of clipping.

A quick checklist

• No lighting painted into the albedo
• Metallic is mostly 0 or 1
• Roughness carries the surface story
• Normal map convention matches the renderer
• Non-colour maps loaded as linear
• Tested under a neutral HDRI

Texturing and materials is one of 3Desite’s core services — PBR material libraries, UV mapping and Substance workflows for metal, wood, fabric, glass and concrete. Browse the material previews in the shop, or follow the hands-on texturing workflow tutorial.