PBR textures

Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) textures allow you to represent realistic shading and lighting by using multiple types of texture images, or maps, on a single object. Combining multiple texture maps can more accurately simulate color, roughness, and reflectivity in any lighting environment and can enhance the visual elements of your assets and environment.

Various applications and workflows are available for creating PBR textures. You can use these during the modeling and texturing phases of custom 3D object creation, provided that Roblox Studio supports the specific texture maps you're using.

This guide provides instructions on setting up your mesh objects to use PBR texture maps, and describes common use-cases and best practices for Roblox's supported PBR texture maps. When creating your own surfaces, see material references for common material values, image comparisons and clothing examples.

Enable surface appearance#

You can add PBR textures to any MeshPart by adding a SurfaceAppearance object which overwrites the original assigned texture. In general, you can't modify SurfaceAppearance properties by scripts during a game because the engine requires some pre-processing to display these graphics. Similar to adding a basic texture, each texture image map must point to the appropriate uploaded image asset ID.

To enable surface appearance for a MeshPart:

1. In the Explorer window, hover over the MeshPart and click the ⊕ button.

2. Insert a SurfaceAppearance from the contextual menu.

   

   When you're ready to add texture maps to the SurfaceAppearance object, you can click each map property in the Properties window and enter an asset ID.

Texture maps#

Studio currently supports 5 types of PBR texture maps: color, normal, roughness, metalness, and emissive. Each of these maps corresponds to an important aspect of the object's surface appearance. Texture maps only change visual appearance and don't affect the geometry of the MeshPart object.

See the following examples for an overview of Roblox's supported texture maps and additional resources:

Color (albedo)#

The color, or albedo, map determines the color of your texture and consists of mostly color information with little to no lighting or textural information. For additional customization, you can also add transparency in your albedo texture by adding opacity to your image map.

Alpha modes#

For objects that require partial or complete sections of transparency, such as grass, leaves, lace, or decals like dirt or grunge, you can use various alpha modes to apply transparency to your color map. If your color map image format supports alpha channels, you can apply a grayscale alpha map where 0.0 is transparent and 1.0 is opaque. Similarly, when using an image format such as a .png, any opacity on the color map applies as transparency on the asset.

You can apply transparency in two different behaviors by setting the following AlphaMode values:

• Opaque — Ignores the alpha channel of the ColorMap and uses the color value directly from the color map.
• Overlay — Overlays the ColorMap over the underlying mesh's MeshPart.Color. Color maps using overlay mode reveal the base color of the mesh anywhere transparency is present. This is the default setting.
• Transparency — Removes the visible mesh based on transparency in the ColorMap. This renders the mesh see-through and does not reveal the original mesh color whenever transparency is present.
• Tint mask — Blends the tinted ColorMap over the un-tinted ColorMap.

Opaque#

You can use AlphaMode.Opaque mode to ignore the alpha channel of the ColorMap altogether. In this case the alpha value is assumed to be 1 (fully opaque).

The following example demonstrates how the Opaque mode works using a blue object as reference:

Overlay#

You can use AlphaMode.Overlay to reveal sections of the mesh's original color. Since the transparent areas of the color map expose the underlying color, you can design a unique texture map that partially or fully reveals the mesh's Color property for custom skin tones or other situations with unique colors.

The following example demonstrates how the Overlay mode works using a light blue sphere reference:

The following example uses the Overlay mode for custom characters, revealing the character's original skin-tone:

See custom skin tone for additional details on optimizing an overlay for skin and similar applications.

Transparency#

You can use the AlphaMode.Transparency mode to create complex or extremely fine objects, such as lace or netting, by removing visible parts of the mesh as an alternative to sculpting the mesh geometry. Since this does not affect the geometry of the mesh object, this can allow you to create detailed objects without the performance impact of an intricate mesh model.

The following example demonstrates how a partial and full transparency in this mode visually removes sections of the mesh:

There are two outcomes of Transparency mode, depending on whether the MeshPart.Transparency is set to 0 or at least 0.02, although numerical precision may result in small values such as 0.01 triggering the opaque transparency.

• When alpha is used to cut out the shape of mostly opaque objects with hard edges such as foliage, lace fabric, and netting, set the MeshPart.Transparency to 0. When parts of the surface are fully opaque, the Roblox engine can render them with proper depth‑based occlusion. Opaque surfaces also generally work better with depth‑based effects like DepthOfFieldEffect, glass and water refraction, and water reflection.
• When alpha is used to add detail to semi‑transparent objects or objects with smooth gradients of transparency, set the MeshPart.Transparency to at least 0.02. This improves the quality of blending for objects such as dirty windows and soft‑edged feathers, but it will not work with all effects.

Tint mask#

You can use the AlphaMode.TintMask mode to apply SurfaceAppearance.Color tinting to selective areas of a surface. The tinting is strongest where the alpha channel is fully visible and not applied where the alpha channel is transparent.

Color tinting#

You can apply a tint to your color map by modifying the SurfaceAppearance.Color property. Tinting does not affect performance and you can save on memory by reusing a single color map with different tints. Use color tinting to create additional low-cost variation between your MeshPart PBR textures or to programmatically modify your PBR surface colors in real-time.

SurfaceAppearance.Color tinting applies as a multiplier, so the final appearance is a function of Color3 (texel color) times SurfaceAppearance.Color. This means that authoring your original SurfaceAppearance.ColorMap in near-white grayscale colors creates the strongest tinting effect when this property is applied.

Tinting only applies to the SurfaceAppearance.ColorMap and not the MeshPart.Color. You can continue to use alpha channels when applying transparency.

When SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode is set to Overlay and an alpha channel is present, the underlying MeshPart.Color is revealed and SurfaceAppearance.Color tinting only applies to the visible SurfaceAppearance color map.

When SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode is set to TintMask and an alpha channel is present, the alpha channel controls the amount of SurfaceAppearance.Color tinting. The tinting is strongest where the alpha channel is fully visible and not applied where the alpha channel is transparent.

Normal#

The normal, or surface, map adds texture depth to your surface and behaves similarly to a height map. As a result, the effect may fade or intensify depending on the viewing angle and lighting environment.

In the following figure, you can switch between the mesh reference and the map reference for comparisons of normal map values:

The R, G, and B channels of the image correspond respectively to the X, Y, and Z components of the local surface vector. A uniform image of color [127, 127, 255] translates to a completely flat normal map. Roblox only supports OpenGL format - Tangent Space normal maps.

Normal maps prominently affect the visual surface of a mesh and can accentuate awkward seams in your texture. Whenever possible, keep your texture seams hidden to avoid visual issues with your mesh.

Roughness#

Roughness, or microsurface, maps determine how light is spread across your model's surface. When roughness is at 0%, the surface doesn't scatter light at all, resulting in a much sharper and brighter reflection and glossiness on your material. At 100%, light and reflections evenly scatter over the model resulting in a less reflective matte-like surface.

The following figure shows comparisons of various roughness map values:

Roughness may impact how reflective an object is at different angles, referred to as the Fresnel effect. Studio's fresnel processing aims for physical real-world accuracy, although you may get unexpected specular contribution at certain angles even with rough surfaces. In some cases, you can compensate by increasing your roughness map value by around 0.1 more rough to achieve a consistent lighting response with your materials.

Even though Roblox renders this lighting effect accurately, the brightness and reflectivity of a surface may not respond consistently between your texture content creating software, such as Substance Painter, and Studio. See clothing examples for differences in rendering between applications.

Metalness#

Metalness determines the reflectivity of a surface. In most cases, you should set this value to either 0% (non-metal) or 100% (metal), although you can use partial metalness values when creating surfaces with moderate reflective properties like satin or silk. This practice can subtly fake the reflections in the material to highlight the color from the color/albedo map over colors reflected in the environment.

See the following figure for comparisons of various metalness map values:

Different PBR renderers use various workflows for processing reflectiveness. Studio only uses the metalness workflow which determines whether a material is a nonmetal or a metal, sometimes referred to as an insulator or conductor.

Emissive mask#

A grayscale EmissiveMaskContent content texture applies an emissive mask across the surface. This lets you use a texture to control emissiveness for more artistic control than the all‑or‑nothing Neon material and allows you to create detailed glowing effects like illuminated text, futuristic armor, or bioluminescent creatures.

The associated EmissiveTint property determines the tinting color for emissive contribution, and EmissiveStrength determines the strength of emissive contribution.