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The PBR Texture Set node is designed as a one stop solution for using a set of PBR textures. It supports both the Metallic and Specular PBR workflows and even converts between both of them if required.
When used with the native Principled BSDF material, a Metallic workflow is preferred.
The node uses a single Projection connected to it for all the images it manages.
If no Projection is connected to the node, it will used the default UVs.
There's also an option to use the built-in triplanar mapping, allowing for quick texturing of generic meshes.
This pop-up allows you to save, load and manage presets of the node settings. This allows you to re-use PBR texture sets.
This pop-up allows for the simple loading of PBR texture sets from files, using file name matching to autmatically assign them to texture slots.
This opens a file requester which has two modes of operation:
Load Textures… will only load images into empty texture slots, unless Clear before Loading is enabled in the Settings.
Clears all texture slots.
This opens the settings window which allows you to change how the plugin will use the image file names to determine which texture slots they should be assigned to.
The settings are saved in the settings folder of the current LightWave 3D installation - not with the plugin itself. To manage multiple naming conventions, these settings can be saved as presets.
This determines if the current loaded textures conform to the Metallic or Specular PBR workflow. Node outputs will be converted as required.
If Metallic is enabled, the Metallic and Roughness textures will be visible. The Colour texture will be interpreted as Base Colour.
If Specular is enabled, the Specular and Roughness textures will be visible. The Colour texture will be interpreted as Diffuse Colour.
Below this you will find a section of pop-ups to select images for the individual channels of a PBR texture set as well as related controls.
Unfortunately the node can't set the colour spaces for the individual images. We've included the recommended settings in <angled brackets>.
The base colour for metallic texture sets or the albedo/diffuse colour for specular texture sets. The alpha channel of this image is available as the Transparency output.
The metallness of the surface. This is a greyscale / scalar value. To allow for the use of a single image as an ORM (Occlusion, Roughness, Metallness) map, only the blue channel of the image is used (and displayed in the thumbnail).
The roughness of the surface. This is a greyscale / scalar value. To allow for the use of a single image as an ORM (Occlusion, Roughness, Metallness) map, only the green channel of the image is used (and displayed in the thumbnail).
The Specularity of the material if a Specular workflow is used. This is a colour image.
The Glossiness of the material if a Specular workflow is used. This is a greyscale / scalar value. To allow for a combined Specular/Opacity map, this will use the alpha channel of the image if one exists, otherwise the luminance.
This is used by all PBR workflows. This is a greyscale / scalar value. To allow for the use of a single image as an ORM (Occlusion, Roughness, Metallness) map, only the red channel of the image is used (and displayed in the thumbnail). This image can be multiplied into the proper texture channels within the node but is also available as an node output.
This is used by all PBR workflows, the colours in this image are essentially added to the shaded material. Make sure that the separate Luminous value in the Principled BSDF material is set to 100% to make this visible.
This slot is for a normal map in tangent space.
This is an optional displacement/height map which can also be used to compute a bump map.
The top part of this tab controls how the image maps are sampled by the node. These settings are identical to those used by the native 2D Image node or the native Image Sampler node.
Triplanar mapping is a type of cubic texture mapping with edge blending.
Please have a look at the Triplanar Mapper for a more elaborate explanation.
Activating this toggle enables Triplanar mapping, overring the Projection input and the use of the default UVs. It also enables the controls below used to control the mapping.
Controls not described here work identically to those used by the native 2D Image node.
This controls how hard/soft the blend of the planar projections is as the normals point away from the major axes.
0% Blend | 20% Blend | 50% Blend | 100% Blend |
We recommend a value between 5% and 20% for most uses.
This controls if the blending is computed in local or in world space. Please note, this only affects how the blending is computed, not how the images are projected.
If this option is enabled, the projected image will be flipped on the U texture coordinate axis on the negative side of the projection. This can be used to make images containing text be readable on the back side of a mesh as well.
Adds an offset to the computed UV coordinates. This can even be used to animate a texture across a surface.
The following inputs are only used if Triplanar Mapping is enabled.
Most of the outputs correspond directly to a mapped image texture. Depending on the PBR mode of the node, some of these may be converted/synthesised from the loaded images.
For example, if a texture set using a Metallic workflow is loaded, the Specular and Glossiness outputs will be synthesised. Likewise, using a Specular workflow, the Metallic and Roughness outputs will be synthesised.
The brackets behind the outputs describe the native workflow for the outputs, the others are shared between both types of texturing workflows.
The base colour for a metallic workflow. If the node is set to use a specular workflow (which has a diffuse colour) this is converted automatically.
The luminance of the Base Colour.
The diffuse colour for a specular workflow. If the node is set to use a metallic workflow (which has a base colour) this is converted automatically.
The luminance of the Diffuse Colour.
This is derived from the alpha channel of the colour image.
The metallness of the texture set. If the set is using a specular workflow, this is computed from the specular colour and diffuse colour maps.
The roughness of the texture set. If the set is using a specular workflow, this is computed from the glossiness.
The specular colour of the texture set. If the set is using a metallic workflow, this is computed from the base colour and the metallness.
The glossiness colour of the texture set. If the set is using a metallic workflow, this is computed from the roughness.
The value extracted from the occlusion map.
The luminous colour map.
The displacement away from the surface, optionally multiplied.
The normal map in tangent space transformed using the current project. This can be applied directly to normal inputs.
The bump map which is computed from a displacement map if one is present in the texture set.
This is the plugin of the month for November 2020, made possible by the finest patrons on Patreon.
We'd like to thank Antti Järvelä from the LightWave 3D Group in helping us figure out the specifics of the bump mapping code in LightWave 3D.