Export and use
Other programs and renderers
Use Matelume maps in any PBR renderer, with which map goes where, OpenGL or DirectX normals, and the tile size and displacement taken from the JSON.
Matelume Guide. Upcoming features are marked separately.
Matelume's maps are the industry-standard PBR set, so any renderer that takes PBR maps can use them: Cinema 4D with Redshift, Unreal Engine, Unity, SketchUp, Enscape, D5 Render, Twinmotion, Lumion and more. Blender and 3ds Max have a Matelume add-on. Everywhere else, you set the material up yourself with the how-to sheet and the .json.
In the Your software step, pick Cinema 4D or Unreal Engine for those programs, and Other software for the rest. Other software gives you all eight maps.
Plug the maps in
| Map | Slot | Colour space |
|---|---|---|
| Color | Base colour, albedo or diffuse | sRGB |
| NormalGL or NormalDX | Normal, through a normal-map node | Non-Color, raw or linear |
| Roughness | Roughness | Non-Color, raw or linear |
| Glossiness | Glossiness, only if your renderer asks for gloss instead of roughness | Non-Color, raw or linear |
| Metalness | Metallic | Non-Color, raw or linear |
| Displacement | Displacement or height, for real displacement only | Non-Color, raw or linear |
| AmbientOcclusion | An AO slot, if your setup has one | Non-Color, raw or linear |
The normal map does the shading, and the displacement map moves the surface. Don't also plug the height into bump, or the relief counts twice. Don't multiply the AO map into the colour.
OpenGL or DirectX normal
Programs read the green channel of a normal map in one of two ways:
- NormalGL (OpenGL): Blender, Cinema 4D with Redshift, Unity.
- NormalDX (DirectX): Unreal Engine, 3ds Max with V-Ray or Corona.
If your program isn't listed here, check which style it expects. If the relief looks inside-out, you've used the other style: swap to the other file, or flip the map's green channel.
Set the tile size
The .json beside the maps holds real_world_size_mm: the width and height of one tile, in millimetres. Set your texture to repeat once over exactly that size.
- A real-world size setting. Where your program sizes textures in real units, such as a bitmap's real-world size in 3ds Max, enter the width and height from the .json.
- UV tiling. Where your object's UVs are in metres, one UV unit per metre, the tiling is 1000 divided by the size in millimetres. A 300 × 212 mm tile repeats 3.33 times across and 4.72 times down.
Keep the width and height in step. Scaling only one way stretches the material.
Set the displacement
The displacement part of the .json says how tall the relief is:
black_mmandwhite_mm: the height of black and of white in the Displacement map, in millimetres;range_mm: the span between them;midlevel: the grey that sits at the surface.
Most renderers ask for one or two of these. V-Ray's displacement modifier, for example, takes range_mm as its amount and black_mm as its shift; Corona takes a minimum and a maximum, black_mm and white_mm. The how-to sheets fill these in for their programs. The Displacement map is 16-bit; keep it 16-bit in your program for smooth relief.
Unreal Engine
Pick Unreal Engine and the export adds a packed ORM map in the extras folder: ambient occlusion in red, roughness in green and metalness in blue, in one texture. Import it with sRGB off and Masks compression, and the NormalDX map with Normalmap compression. Use the Displacement map only with Nanite displacement or tessellation. Tile it so one repeat covers the size in the .json at world scale. USE_IN_UNREAL.md has the full setup.
Note: The Unreal setup follows Unreal's standard slots, but we haven't tested it inside Unreal yet.
Cinema 4D
Pick Cinema 4D for Redshift. It takes the NormalGL map through a bump map node in Tangent-Space Normal mode. USE_IN_C4D.md lists each slot and the displacement numbers.
Sheen and other extras
Glow maps for pile fabrics come as optional extras in the extras folder. The Blender add-on and the 3ds Max plugin plug them in for you. Elsewhere, use them only if your material has a sheen slot. Without them, the eight standard maps still give the full material, just without the extra glow.