Image to PBR Maps: A Practical Workflow

1. Choose a source that describes the surface

Start with a front-facing surface image under even light. Avoid a strong cast shadow, a bright reflection, perspective distortion or a large object crossing the frame. Those features become part of the image and can influence every derived map.

Decide which crop you need before conversion. Check the working image and output dimensions in the tool. Keep the original separately: resizing, border blending and map adjustments should not become your only remaining copy.

2. Understand the five files

Texel derives maps with browser image processing. Brightness and nearby pixel differences provide useful cues, but dark paint is not necessarily a cavity and a white mark is not necessarily raised.

• Base color carries the processed surface image. It can still contain lighting from the source; conversion does not automatically remove it.
• Normal encodes local surface directions estimated from height. Choose the green-channel convention required by your material setup.
• Roughness estimates variation in the spread of reflections. Inspect it independently; a colorful pattern need not have varying roughness.
• Height is a grayscale relief estimate. It is not a scan or a measurement of depth in millimeters.
• Ambient occlusion estimates local darkening. It does not know the surrounding scene or replace its lighting.

3. Adjust in an order you can diagnose

First decide whether the base image needs seam blending. Check its repeat before judging small surface details. Then set height contrast and raise normal strength gradually. Excessive strength can turn subtle grain into sharp ridges.

Adjust roughness and AO last. Compare each map with the combined material preview, changing one control at a time. If a painted mark keeps becoming a bump, edit the source or use a prepared height image; stronger settings will reinforce the mistake.

4. Connect maps deliberately

In Blender, route a tangent-space normal texture through a Normal Map node and set that image to Non-Color. Its UV mapping must agree with the material. Blender’s displacement documentation also distinguishes bump shading from actual displacement, which needs suitable mesh subdivision.

Check the exact shader before importing into a game engine. Unity’s URP Lit shader uses smoothness and supports specific packed channels; a separate roughness PNG is not a ready-made packed texture. Unreal exposes roughness and metallic as distinct material inputs. Texel does not supply a metallic map or assemble these engine materials.

5. Validate the exported result

Download the individual PNGs or ZIP, reopen the files and confirm their dimensions. Keep their UV scale aligned. Test them on the intended mesh under more than one light direction, including the distance at which players or viewers will see it.

Record the source, settings and normal convention alongside the files. The export contains images, not automatic UVs, a native Blender file or a guarantee of production readiness. For close-up displacement, review precision requirements: Blender notes that 16- or 32-bit displacement images preserve more detail than 8-bit images.

Sources and further reading

• Blender Manual — Normal Map node
• Blender Manual — Material displacement
• Unity 6.3 Manual — URP Lit shader inputs
• Unreal Engine documentation — Physically based materials

Related material notes

• OpenGL vs DirectX Normal Maps: Check the Green Channel
• How to Check Whether a Texture Is Seamless