How to Make a PBR Material From a Text Prompt
By the Cosindra team · Updated November 1, 2026
Open MaterialForge, describe one surface in plain words, such as "cracked concrete floor, fine dust and subtle oil stains", and press Generate: you get a tileable PBR set (Base Color, Normal, Roughness, AO, Metallic and Height maps) plus an Unreal material recipe for 4 credits. Then click Apply in UE5 and the free Cosindra desktop app builds the material and a Material Instance in your open Unreal project, or download a ZIP made for Unreal, Unity HDRP or OpenGL tools such as Blender and Godot. A free account's first month (80 credits) covers 20 materials.
Below: the steps that work today, the maps and file sizes you get, how tiling works (the seamless texture question for Unreal is answered here too), every download option, the Unreal import settings from the README in each ZIP, and the limits.
Make a PBR material from text, step by step
1. Open MaterialForge and sign in. A free Starter account generates in Single mode; Variations, Material Packs, From image and Pro Engine need a paid plan.
2. Choose Single and describe one surface: what it is, its condition and its finish. A long, detailed prompt still makes one material. MaterialForge wraps the texture request in its own flat lighting, seamless template, so you do not have to ask for that.
3. Pick the engine. Standard costs 4 credits a material; Pro Engine, on paid plans, costs 9 and adds a relief pass (an estimated normal map and height-based AO); Pro 4K costs 13. The Generate button shows the total before you start. Press Generate, or Cmd/Ctrl + Enter.
4. Inspect the result on a sphere, cube or plane and look at each map. To see it on your own mesh, choose Paint a model and open a self-contained .glb (up to 50 MB and 1.5 million triangles); previewing sends nothing.
5. Tune it for free. Adjust Parameters changes the values the recipe exposes, such as tint and UV tiling; Surface Lab changes the maps themselves: relief depth, roughness and its variation, and ambient occlusion. Each saved adjustment is a new result and the original stays. Refine and New Variation are new paid generations, not edits of the current image.
6. Save the material to your library. A result you do not save is kept for 24 hours, then deleted.
7. Bring it into Unreal. With the Cosindra desktop app running and your UE 5.7 to 5.8 project connected, click Apply in UE5. Or choose a download format (Unreal, Unreal + ORM, OpenGL or Unity HDRP) and download the ZIP.
8. If you downloaded, import the PNGs into Unreal with the settings below and build the material as recipe.json describes.
What you get: maps, sizes and files
A new textured material has six maps and a recipe. Pro renders the texture and maps at 2048x2048 (2K); Standard renders 1024x1024. Pro 4K is the 2K render upscaled to 4096x4096 with an AI upscaler, for 13 credits. Apply in UE5 imports the 2K maps for now; your downloads get the 4K maps.
The normal map uses the DirectX convention (green = -Y) that Unreal expects. Every ZIP carries a README with these conventions.
| File | Map | Notes from the ZIP README |
|---|---|---|
| basecolor.png | Base Color (albedo) | sRGB |
| normal.png | Normal | Tangent space, DirectX (green = -Y), linear. The OpenGL download flips it to +Y |
| roughness.png | Roughness | Linear grayscale, white = rough |
| ao.png | Ambient occlusion | Linear grayscale, white = unoccluded |
| metallic.png | Metallic | Linear grayscale, white = metal; non-metal materials get an all-black map |
| height.png | Height | Linear grayscale, white = high, for parallax or displacement; use it as a mask, not a color texture |
| orm.png | Packed (Unreal + ORM only) | R = AO, G = roughness, B = metallic; linear (sRGB off, Compression = Masks) |
| mask.png | Packed (Unity HDRP only) | R = metallic, G = AO, B = detail mask, A = smoothness (1 - roughness) |
| recipe.json | Unreal material graph | Nodes, values, connections and material outputs for these maps |
Seamless textures for Unreal
Every textured MaterialForge material is made to tile. The Base Color is rendered as a tileable image (a seam fix runs when a source does not wrap), and Normal, Roughness, AO and Height are all derived from that tileable image, so every map tiles in step with it. Pro 4K pads each map with wrap-around pixels before the upscale, so the 4K maps still tile.
To change how often the texture repeats on a surface, open Adjust Parameters and change UV tiling. It costs no credits; the recipe's TexCoord node takes U and V tiling values from 0.01 to 100. Save the adjustment, then save or apply it like any other result.
This is why there is no separate seamless texture generator page: making a seamless texture for Unreal from text is the same tool, the same steps and the same files as making a PBR material from text.
Import into Unreal Engine by hand
Apply in UE5 does this for you: it imports Base Color, Normal, Roughness and AO with the right settings and builds a parameterized material plus a Material Instance. Metallic stays the recipe's value there, and metallic.png and height.png are not imported by Apply. For a downloaded ZIP, these are the settings its README gives:
- normal.png: Compression = Normalmap, Flip Green Channel off (the Unreal ZIP). With the OpenGL ZIP, Flip Green Channel on.
- roughness.png, ao.png, metallic.png, height.png and orm.png: sRGB off, Compression = Masks (or Grayscale for the single maps).
- basecolor.png: keep the defaults (sRGB on).
- Then wire the textures into a material as recipe.json describes. Procedural materials have no image files; recipe.json is the whole material.
- Epic docs: Physically Based Materials in Unreal Engine: what Base Color, Metallic, Roughness and the other inputs mean
- Set up Apply in UE5
- Connect your Unreal project
Unity, Godot, Blender and three.js
Unreal is where MaterialForge goes deepest (the recipe and Apply in UE5). For other engines, choose the download option made for them: the maps are converted when you download.
| Engine or tool | Download option | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Unreal Engine 5 | Apply in UE5, Unreal, or Unreal + ORM | DirectX normal; Unreal + ORM adds orm.png |
| Unity HDRP | Unity HDRP | OpenGL normal plus mask.png. Import the mask with sRGB (Color Texture) off and Alpha Is Transparency off. HDRP only: URP and Built-in pack maps differently |
| Blender, Unity, Godot, three.js | OpenGL | Normal map converted to OpenGL (+Y); the other maps are unchanged |
- Free texture channel packer: pack maps you already have into the ORM or HDRP mask layout, or flip a normal map's green channel, in your browser
Limits
- Starter generates in Single mode. Variations (2 or 4 materials), Material Packs (2 to 8 materials), From image and Pro Engine are on paid plans.
- Procedural surfaces such as glass, gold or an energy shield can come back as a recipe only, with no image maps.
- Apply in UE5 imports four maps and keeps metallic as a value; for Pro 4K it imports the 2K maps, and the downloads carry the 4K maps.
- Apply in UE5 costs no credits but needs the Cosindra desktop app and UE 5.7 to 5.8. Starter includes one lifetime free download, shared across products. More downloads come with a paid plan (from $9.99 a month for 150 credits) or a one-time credit pack ($5 for 50 credits, $10 for 100 or $20 for 200), whose credits never expire and which opens downloads for 15 to 30 days.
- An unsaved result is deleted after 24 hours. Saving one material from a pack does not keep the others.
- Refine, New Variation and Retry start a fresh paid generation; none of them edits the current image.
- From image (paid plans) keeps the lighting, shadows and perspective of your photo; flat, evenly lit, head-on shots work best.
Keep going
- Open MaterialForge
- MaterialForge workflow guide: Single, Variations, Material Packs, From image, saving and recovery
- PBR basics for UE5: plus channel-by-channel recipes for common surfaces
Generate the material instead
MaterialForge turns a text description into a complete Unreal material: tileable textures, derived PBR maps and the node graph, applied into your open editor in one click or downloaded for your engine. A material costs 4 credits.
Try MaterialForgeFrequently asked questions
Can I make a PBR material from a text prompt for free?
Yes. A free Starter account generates in Single mode at 4 credits a material, and the 80 credits of a new account's first month cover 20 materials. Apply in UE5 costs no credits. Starter includes one lifetime free download, shared across products.
Which maps does a text-to-material result include?
A new textured material includes Base Color, Normal, Roughness, AO, Metallic and Height maps plus recipe.json, the Unreal material graph. Unreal + ORM adds an ORM map, and Unity HDRP adds a mask map.
Can I generate seamless textures for Unreal Engine 5?
Yes. Every textured MaterialForge material is made to tile: the Base Color is rendered as a tileable image and every other map is derived from it, so all maps tile together, including the 4K maps of Pro 4K. Change UV tiling in Adjust Parameters for free to set how often it repeats.
What resolution are the textures?
Pro renders the texture and maps at 2048x2048 (2K); Standard renders 1024x1024. Pro 4K, for 13 credits, is the 2K render upscaled to 4096x4096.
Do the normal maps use the DirectX or OpenGL convention?
DirectX (green = -Y), the convention Unreal expects. The OpenGL and Unity HDRP downloads convert the normal map to OpenGL (+Y) for Blender, Unity, Godot and three.js.
Does it work outside Unreal Engine?
Yes, as files. The OpenGL download is for Blender, Unity, Godot and three.js, and the Unity HDRP download adds an HDRP mask map. The Unreal recipe and Apply in UE5 are Unreal only.
Can I use the materials commercially?
Yes, on every plan, including the free Starter plan. You keep the rights to the materials you make, including their textures and Unreal recipes.