Input Maps are your base texture inputs for the material linked with your Texture Project. These maps should be unique to the mesh you wish to start texturing and are typically generated by the texture baking process (from a Bake Project in Toolbag, or external source).
The pixel data in each Input Map will be used in the Texture Project’s layering system as base color values for each of your active Project Maps and will also drive Processor layers for more intelligent masking based on information in your Input Maps.
The basic UI for managing Input Maps is as follows:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Input Map Texture | Click to load or replace a texture map. |
| Remove | Remove an input map from the texture project. Any layer types that use this input may no longer render correctly if removed. |
| Add New | Add an input map that is not presently listed i.e Transmission Mask, Sheen, Glint, Thickness etc. |
Input Map Types #
The following is a complete list of all Input Map types supported and what each map controls in your Texture Project.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Albedo | Establishes the base color of your material. It’s typically a single color or a flat light image. |
| Ambient Occlusion | A shadowing technique that includes soft shadows simulated by intersecting geometry to help make your asset more realistic. |
| Bump | A greyscale map that simulates depth information such as bumps or wrinkles on an object. |
| Bump Weight | Sets the strength of the bump map effect. |
| Gloss | Gloss and Roughness maps control the glossiness or shininess of the material. The difference between them is how the value ranges are mapped. For Gloss maps, 0 or black represents the rough, porous surface, and 1.0 or white represents a glossy, smooth, mirror-like surface. For Roughness maps, the value range is inverted, with black representing glossy surfaces and white representing rough surfaces. |
| Metalness | Metalness defines whether areas of your material behave like metal or not. Black values in the map will appear as metal, and white areas appear as an insulator. |
| Normal | Normal mapping is a technique used to fake the lighting of mid to micro-details (such as bumps and dents) to give your textures depth without using more mesh geometry. This map uses RGB colors to define the lighting direction of these details in a 3D space. |
| Roughness | Roughness (also called glossiness or microsurface scattering) defines how light scatters across the surface of your model. |
| Specular | You can use a specular map instead of a Metalness map in PBR texturing. Specular maps in PBR can use full RGB color and affect how you design your albedo. |
| Transparency | This map is used when working with transparent materials. |
| Cavity | This map stores small-scale ambient occlusion and defines cavity detail. |
| Displacement | This map is similar to normal maps in that they are used to add mid to small details to your texture. The difference is that height maps will tessellate your mesh instead of faking detail like normal maps (increase the poly count) and add the data to the 3D mesh. |
| Emissive | Adds emission and a glow effect to your material. |
| Fuzz | This is used to help define fabric and other microfiber materials to make them look more realistic. |
| Glint | Allows you to author a glint mask, which is used to isolate areas where glint should appear. |
| Glint Roughness | Author a glint roughness map to define the roughness of the glint map. |
| Refraction Depth | Configures the depth of your refraction map. Refraction is the process of light bending as it passes through transparent objects or liquids, distorting how things appear when looking through the object. |
| Scatter | This allows you to set the scattering depth and determine which mesh parts should be scattered. Note: Toolbag’s subsurface shading models consider mesh thickness, so applying a thickness map is no longer necessary. You can add thickness information to the Scatter Map if you like; however, it is unnecessary. |
| Thickness | When added, this map sets the thickness input map as the base content for the scatter project map. |
| Sheen | An RGB texture that controls the color and intensity of the sheen effect. |
| Sheen Roughness | This grayscale texture controls the roughness of the sheen effect. |
| Transmission Mask | This map is an omnidirectional thickness map for semi-translucent materials. |
