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Material Assets

Asset Forge builds PBR material assets from texture folders. Point it at a root directory, and it scans for texture maps, wires up shader graphs, and registers everything as assets in the Asset Browser.

Texture Sources

Texture Root

Set Texture Root to a folder containing your texture sets. The scanner traverses subfolders recursively and groups textures by their base name, looking for common PBR map suffixes.

A typical folder structure might look like:

textures/
├── brick_wall/
│   ├── brick_wall_basecolor.png
│   ├── brick_wall_normal.png
│   ├── brick_wall_roughness.png
│   └── brick_wall_height.png
├── metal_plate/
│   ├── metal_plate_basecolor.png
│   ├── metal_plate_normal.png
│   ├── metal_plate_metallic.png
│   └── metal_plate_roughness.png

Each subfolder with a valid base color map becomes one material asset.

Manual Overrides

Enable per-map folder overrides to point any map type at a different directory. This is useful when your maps are organized by type rather than by material:

base_color/
├── brick_wall.png
├── metal_plate.png
normal/
├── brick_wall.png
├── metal_plate.png

When an override is enabled for a map type, it replaces the corresponding result from the Texture Root scan for that map type.

Combine Root + Overrides

When enabled, required map types are combined from both the root scan and the enabled overrides. When disabled, overrides fully replace the root scan results for their map types.

Example

With Combine Root + Overrides enabled: if your root folder contains base color and normal maps, and you enable a roughness override pointing to a separate folder, all three map types become required.

Texture Naming Keywords

The scanner matches textures by keywords in the filename or parent folder name. Default keywords cover common conventions like basecolor, diffuse, albedo for base color, normal, nrm for normals, etc.

You can customize keywords for each map type:

  • Base Color — basecolor, base_color, base-colour, base_colour, basecolour, albedo, diffuse, color, colour, col
  • Normal — normalgl, normal_gl, normaldx, normal_dx, normal, nrm, nor
  • Roughness — roughness, rough, rgh
  • Metallic — metalness, metallic, metal
  • Height — displacement, height, bump, disp
  • Alpha — opacity, alpha, mask

Folder Tails are shared keywords for parent folder names like maps and textures — folders matching these tails are traversed into rather than treated as material names.

Build Options

Shader Choice

  • Principled BSDF — Full PBR setup. Connects base color, roughness, metallic, normal, and height when those maps are detected. Materials remain opaque unless a dedicated Alpha, Opacity, or Mask texture is detected; any alpha channel embedded in the Base Color image is ignored.
  • Diffuse — Simpler shader graph. Uses base color and still applies normal and height detail when those maps are available.

Material Preview

Choose the Blender preview shape used for generated material asset thumbnails. Flat, Sphere, Cube, and Shaderball are available so you can match the preview style to the material you are building.

Overwrite Policy

Controls what happens when a material with the same name already exists:

  • Update Generated Only — Only overwrite materials that were previously created by Asset Forge. User-made materials are protected. (default)
  • Skip Existing — Never overwrite. Existing materials are left untouched.
  • Force Replace Existing — Replace any existing material with the same name.

Warning

Force Replace Existing will replace hand-made materials. Use Dry Run first to check what will be affected.

Detect UDIM Tiles

When enabled, the scanner detects numbered tile sets like 1001, 1002, 1003 and groups them as a single UDIM material. Asset Forge then treats that set as one tiled texture input inside the generated material.

Requirements Inference

Required maps are inferred automatically from what the scanner detects in your texture root. If every texture set in your root folder includes a normal map, normal maps become required — and any set missing a normal map will be skipped.

Base color is always required regardless of what's detected.

Tip

Check the report panel after a build (or dry run) to see exactly which sets were skipped and why.

Running a Build

  1. Configure your texture sources and build options, including Shader, Material Preview, and overwrite behavior.
  2. Optionally enable Dry Run to preview results.
  3. Click Make Material Assets.
  4. Check the report panel at the top of the sidebar for results.

The report shows how many materials were created, skipped, or overwritten, with expandable details per material, including required maps, missing maps, detected UDIM tiles, and the source path used for each texture input.