PBR Material Packer

The PBR Material Packer is a tool for combining image textures into the same image for use in graphic APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX.  This includes materials and normal maps which follow the metallic/roughness workflow.  

Tutorial Link (Covers everything below and more)

It is tool primarily intended to support the Eclipse Light Engine 

It is also useful for other graphical programming, as seen here in WebGL which uses packed materials.

Common uses: 

• Generate PBR material for a 2D sprite 
• Combine or mix existing material maps into a single image
• Create material for Spine 2D skeletal sprites
• Quick PBR previewer

Materials are packed into the following color channels:

• Red - Metallic
• Green - Roughness
• Blue - Ambient Occlusion

Normal Maps can have their alpha channel encoded with an emissive value.  A minimum of 1/255 is used to represent the actual alpha and any value greater is the emissive.  This saves having to load an entire emissive map into texture memory, and when sampling the albedo/diffuse the emissive value can then be calculated as well.  In the Eclipse Light Engine the emissive value is used in the bloom passes to create better looking emissives.

How to use: (tutorial video coming soon...)  

• Drag and drop texture images into the appropriately labelled icon area in the bottom right of the screen.  E.g., drag metalness.png to the metal location.

• Swap between material and normal maps by clicking the upper right buttons.  The Clip map is optional and serves as an alpha clip image that will be applied to both material and normal map.  This is very useful for 2D sprite texturing by using the original sprite albedo as the clip mask.

• The save location can be changed or it will default to the location of the first image loaded.

• Metallic and Roughness have optional sliders that will scale the currently read values, and the Use AO checkbox will factor in the current ambient occlusion to those values.  This is intended for adding small tweaks to existing materials or when generating sprite materials from nothing. 

If you only have 2D sprite assets it is recommended to first use a tool to generate a good normal map for the sprite.  Then using Blender (example included) it is possible to bake the ambient occlusion from that normal map.  Using those two images along with the original sprite in the PBR Packer is it possible to generate a full image material texture for use in a PBR pipeline.  (tutorial also coming soon...)

Tick the Lit box when viewing the material to see a preview of the fully lit material using the Eclipse Light Engine.