Material Forge

Material Forge is an AI-assisted PBR material creator for game development. Use it to create surface textures from a description, automatically build supporting material maps, tune physically based settings in a live 3D preview, save materials to your library, and export them for use in games, prototypes, rendering pipelines, and WizardGenie projects.

Open Material Forge

What it does

Material Forge is designed for texture-first material creation. You describe a material surface, the tool creates a square base texture, then derives useful PBR maps and lets you refine how the material reacts to light.

A Material Forge material can include:

• Base color texture
• Normal map
• Roughness map
• Metallic map
• Emissive map
• Ambient occlusion map
• Physically based properties such as metallic, roughness, opacity, clearcoat, sheen, transmission, IOR, tiling, texture scale, and texture rotation

The live preview helps you judge whether a material is too glossy, too flat, too bumpy, too dark, too metallic, not transparent enough, or not tiling well.

Main workspace

Material Forge is organized around three working areas:

• Generate panel — enter a material prompt, choose texture generation settings, optionally use a reference image, and start creation.
• Gallery or viewport — browse saved materials in the gallery, or inspect the current material in a live 3D preview.
• Inspector and export panel — edit material properties, manage texture slots and map derivation, update thumbnails, and export.

On smaller screens, Generate and Inspect open as slide-out panels from the top controls. On larger screens, they appear beside the gallery or preview.

Typical workflow

1. Open Material Forge.
2. In the Generate panel, describe a material surface.
   • Good examples: “mossy forest rock,” “aged copper with green patina,” “frosted glass,” “wet cobblestone street,” “weathered sci-fi metal panel.”
3. Choose your texture generation options.
4. Enable Seamless if you need a tileable repeating texture.
5. Optionally add a reference image if the selected texture model supports references.
6. Start generation.
7. The new material appears in your gallery when it is ready.
8. Open the material to inspect it in 3D.
9. Adjust material properties, derived maps, tiling, scale, and texture visibility.
10. Update the thumbnail if desired.
11. Export the finished material in the format that best fits your workflow.

Generated materials are saved to your Material Forge gallery when you are signed in.

Prompting for better material textures

Material Forge works best when the prompt describes a flat surface, not an object, scene, or product render. The generated image is wrapped onto a 3D preview shape, so it should look like an edge-to-edge material sample.

Prefer prompts like:

• “rusty iron plate surface”
• “top-down cracked marble floor texture”
• “dark mossy bark surface”
• “weathered sci-fi wall panel”
• “blue crystal surface texture”

Avoid prompts like:

• “a sword made of rusty iron”
• “a crystal floating in space”
• “a room with marble floors”
• “a wooden barrel render”

If you name an object, Material Forge may reinterpret it as the object’s surface material. For example, “wooden barrel” is better treated as aged barrel wood, and “alien crystal” is better treated as an alien crystal surface.

Generation options

Texture model

Choose the image model used to generate the base texture. Available models and model-specific options can change as the Sorceress model library is updated. Material Forge remembers your last selected texture model and model settings in your browser.

Generate texture

The Generate panel includes a texture generation toggle. Use texture generation when you want a new base color texture and derived PBR maps. When working with an existing material in the editor, the assistant focuses on modifying material settings rather than replacing the texture unless you return to the gallery and start a new material.

Seamless

Enable Seamless when the material needs to repeat across large surfaces such as floors, walls, terrain, fabric, brickwork, panels, or ground materials.

Seamless generation asks for a tileable square texture. Even with seamless generation, highly distinctive shapes can still make repetition obvious. Use the Tiled preview geometry to inspect repetition.

Reference image

If supported by the selected texture model, you can provide a reference image. References are useful for color palette, surface style, pattern direction, or visual inspiration. The result is still intended to be a flat material texture, not a copy of an entire object or scene.

Prompt assistance

Material Forge can use its material assistant to interpret your description, choose physically appropriate PBR values, categorize the material, and frame the texture request as a flat surface texture. This helps avoid common PBR mistakes such as making water metallic, making non-metal materials too reflective, or tinting a generated texture with a non-white base color.

Gallery workflow

The gallery is the default view. It shows your saved Material Forge materials and any active generation entries.

From the gallery you can:

• Open a material in the 3D editor.
• Duplicate a material to create an independent copy.
• Reuse a prompt from a previous material as the starting point for a new generation.
• Remove pending or failed entries from the gallery.
• Resume interrupted in-progress generations when possible.

Opening a material switches to the viewport editor. Use Close Editor to return to the gallery.

Live 3D preview

The viewport displays the current material on a selectable preview shape. Available preview geometries are:

• Sphere
• Cube
• Torus
• Plane
• Cylinder
• Tiled preview

Use different preview shapes for different checks:

• Sphere is best for judging reflections, roughness, clearcoat, sheen, metallic behavior, glass, and transmission.
• Plane is useful for checking the texture as a flat surface.
• Tiled preview helps reveal repetition and visible seams.
• Cube and Cylinder help show edge highlights, normal strength, and texture scale.
• Torus is useful for seeing how the material behaves across curved surfaces.

Editing material properties

Open a material and use the Inspector to tune its PBR settings. Changes are saved automatically after a short delay when you are signed in.

Name

You can rename the material in the Inspector. Use clear names such as “Mossy Basalt,” “Wet Sci-Fi Floor,” or “Frosted Blue Glass” so the gallery stays easy to browse.

Base color

The base tint of the material. If a base color texture exists, white shows the texture as-is. Any other color tints or darkens the texture.

If a generated texture looks unexpectedly dark or colored, check that the base color is white.

Metallic

Controls whether the surface behaves like metal.

• 0 = non-metal materials such as wood, stone, dirt, fabric, plastic, glass, and water
• 1 = real metals such as steel, gold, copper, aluminum, chrome, or bronze

Most real-world materials should be either fully non-metallic or fully metallic. Rust, paint, corrosion, or mixed surfaces may use partial values.

Roughness

Controls reflection sharpness.

• Low roughness = glossy, shiny, mirror-like reflections
• High roughness = matte or diffuse appearance

If reflections overpower the texture, increase roughness. If the material looks too dull, lower roughness.

Normal intensity

Controls the strength of bump detail from the normal map.

• Lower it if the material looks noisy, harsh, or overly bumpy.
• Raise it if the surface looks flat.

Ambient occlusion intensity

Controls crevice darkening from the ambient occlusion map.

• Lower it if shadows look too heavy or blotchy.
• Raise it if cracks and recessed areas need more depth.

Opacity

Controls simple fade-style transparency.

For realistic glass, water, ice, or crystals, use Transmission instead of lowering opacity.

Emissive color and intensity

Adds self-lit glow. Use this for lava, neon, screens, magic runes, sci-fi panels, energy crystals, and other glowing materials.

Clearcoat and clearcoat roughness

Adds a transparent glossy layer on top of the material. This is useful for wet surfaces, varnished wood, lacquer, car paint, glazed ceramic, and polished coatings.

• Higher clearcoat = stronger top-layer shine
• Lower clearcoat roughness = sharper glossy reflections

Sheen and sheen color

Adds a soft grazing-angle highlight, especially useful for fabrics.

Use sheen for velvet, silk, satin, wool, stylized cloth, and soft organic highlights.

IOR and transmission

Transmission lets light pass through the surface for materials such as glass, water, ice, crystal, acrylic, and gemstones. IOR controls how strongly light bends.

Common references:

• Water: about 1.33
• Glass: about 1.5
• Diamond-like materials: about 2.42

For glass and water, keep metallic at 0. Reflections come from low roughness and transmission, not from metallic.

Texture scale, rotation, and tiling

Material Forge includes controls for how textures are placed on the preview surface:

• Texture scale changes the apparent size of the texture uniformly.
• Texture rotation rotates the texture in degrees.
• Tiling X/Y controls how many times the texture repeats horizontally and vertically.

If the pattern is too large, increase tiling or reduce texture scale. If it is too small or busy, decrease tiling or increase texture scale. Use rotation for directional materials such as wood grain, brushed metal, planks, or fabric weave.

Texture slots and visibility

A material can include these texture slots:

• Base color
• Normal
• Roughness
• Metallic
• Emissive
• Ambient occlusion

The Inspector lets you change texture slots and toggle visibility for each map. Visibility toggles are useful for diagnosis:

• Turn off the normal map to see whether bumps are causing noise.
• Turn off the roughness map to compare uniform roughness against texture-driven variation.
• Turn off the metallic map if a non-metal surface is reflecting incorrectly.
• Turn off ambient occlusion if the material has dark patches.
• Turn off emissive if bright areas are glowing too strongly.

Automatic map derivation

When a base color texture is added or generated, Material Forge can derive supporting maps automatically. These maps are an approximation from the base image and are useful for fast iteration and prototyping.

Default derivation behavior:

• Normal derivation: enabled
• Roughness derivation: enabled
• Ambient occlusion derivation: enabled
• Metallic derivation: disabled
• Emissive derivation: disabled

When you change derivation settings, Material Forge reprocesses the maps after a short delay.

Normal derivation

Creates bump information from brightness differences in the base texture.

Options:

• Enabled — turns normal derivation on or off.
• Strength — controls how pronounced the derived bumps are.

Use lower strength for water, fabric, smooth plastic, and subtle surfaces. Use higher strength for stone, bark, brick, rough masonry, cracked ground, or heavily weathered surfaces.

Roughness derivation

Creates per-pixel roughness variation.

Options:

• Enabled — turns roughness derivation on or off.
• Bias — blends between detail-based and brightness-based roughness behavior.
• Invert — flips which areas are rough versus smooth.
• Contrast — controls how much variation appears in the roughness map.

If shiny and matte areas feel backward, try invert. If the surface sparkles or looks too noisy, reduce contrast.

Ambient occlusion derivation

Creates crevice-style darkening from the base texture.

Options:

• Enabled — turns AO derivation on or off.
• Strength — controls shadow darkness.
• Radius — controls how broad the shadowing is.

Use smaller radius for fine cracks and larger radius for broader recesses.

Metallic derivation

Attempts to infer metallic regions from the base texture.

Options:

• Enabled — turns metallic derivation on or off.
• Threshold — controls how aggressively areas are treated as metallic.
• Invert — flips metallic and non-metallic classification.

For water, glass, wood, stone, dirt, fabric, plastic, organic materials, and most painted surfaces, metallic derivation should usually stay off.

Emissive derivation

Creates glow regions from bright or saturated parts of the base texture.

Options:

• Enabled — turns emissive derivation on or off.
• Threshold — controls what brightness level becomes emissive.
• Intensity — controls glow strength.

Use emissive derivation for lava cracks, neon strips, glowing crystals, magic markings, screens, and sci-fi panels.

AI modification mode

When you open an existing material in the viewport, the Generate panel switches to a modification workflow. Instead of creating a new material, you can describe what you want changed:

• “Make it less shiny.”
• “The bumps are too harsh.”
• “Make this look more like frosted glass.”
• “The water has dark patches.”
• “Add a subtle glow to the cracks.”
• “Make the pattern feel less busy.”

The assistant can adjust material properties and derivation settings based on your feedback. It does not replace the texture while you are in this edit-focused mode. To create a completely new material, close the editor and start a new generation from the gallery workflow.

Saving and thumbnails

Materials are saved automatically when you are signed in and the material is not just the empty default material. Edits to properties, textures, and derivation settings are autosaved after a short delay.

The Inspector also includes a thumbnail update action. Use it after changing the preview shape, camera view, or material settings if you want the gallery thumbnail to better represent the current result.

Exporting materials

The export panel appears when you are editing a material in the viewport. Material Forge supports several export-oriented outputs:

• A binary 3D asset with the material applied to a preview mesh
• A texture archive containing available texture maps and material property metadata
• Engine-oriented material setup output and instructions
• Shader-oriented output for custom rendering workflows
• A WizardGenie material bundle when used in a WizardGenie workflow

For texture archive exports, only texture slots that exist on the material are included. The archive also includes material property metadata so you can recreate the PBR setup in your target tool.

When exporting to a game engine or renderer, verify the final appearance there. Different tools may interpret roughness, smoothness, color space, transparency, clearcoat, sheen, and transmission differently.

WizardGenie hand-off

Material Forge can be opened as part of a WizardGenie workflow. In that context, the export panel can package the material as a WizardGenie-compatible material bundle, including the available texture maps and the relevant PBR settings.

Use this when you want a material created in Material Forge to become part of a WizardGenie project or asset workflow.

Physically accurate material guidance

Use these practical rules when refining materials:

• Wood, stone, dirt, grass, concrete, fabric, plastic, glass, and water are not metallic. Keep metallic at 0.
• Actual metals such as steel, gold, copper, aluminum, chrome, and bronze should usually have high metallic values.
• Rusty or corroded metals often have lower metallic values and higher roughness.
• Wet surfaces usually need clearcoat and lower roughness, not metallic.
• Water should use metallic 0, low roughness, transmission, and an IOR around 1.33.
• Glass should use metallic 0, transmission, an IOR around 1.5, and roughness based on clarity: low for clear glass, higher for frosted glass.
• Fabric usually has high roughness and may benefit from sheen.
• Generated textured materials often look better with moderate to high roughness so the texture remains visible.
• If a texture exists, base color should usually stay white unless you intentionally want to tint it.

Tips and troubleshooting

The material looks too shiny

Increase roughness. If a roughness map is active, reduce roughness contrast or adjust roughness derivation. For non-metal materials, make sure metallic is 0.

The material looks too flat

Increase normal intensity, increase normal derivation strength, or increase ambient occlusion strength. Make small changes first; strong normal values can quickly become noisy.

The bumps look too harsh

Lower normal intensity and normal derivation strength. High-contrast base textures can create exaggerated derived normals.

The texture is too dark or shadowy

Lower ambient occlusion intensity or AO derivation strength. Also check that base color is white if a texture is present.

Water has dark patches or looks metallic

Set metallic to 0, disable or minimize metallic derivation, reduce ambient occlusion, keep roughness low, and use transmission with an IOR around 1.33.

The generated image is an object instead of a surface

Regenerate with a prompt that explicitly describes a flat material surface. For example, use “aged barrel wood surface” instead of “wooden barrel,” or “blue crystal surface texture” instead of “a blue crystal.”

The texture does not tile cleanly

Enable Seamless and regenerate. Then inspect with the Tiled preview. If repetition is obvious, try a less distinctive prompt or adjust tiling so repeated features are less noticeable.

The pattern is too large

Increase Tiling X/Y or reduce Texture Scale. If the material was generated with a single large feature, regenerate with a prompt that asks for smaller, more evenly distributed surface detail.

The pattern is too small or busy

Decrease Tiling X/Y or increase Texture Scale. You can also reduce normal strength and roughness contrast to calm down noisy detail.

I do not see the Inspector

The Inspector appears when you are editing an actual material in the viewport. Open a saved or generated material from the gallery first.

A generation failed or stopped

Return to the gallery. Failed or pending entries can be removed, and interrupted in-progress generations may be resumed when possible. If generation repeatedly fails, try a shorter prompt, a different texture model, or fewer special constraints.

FAQ

Are derived maps the same as artist-authored PBR maps?

No. Derived maps are automated approximations from the base color texture. They are useful for fast iteration, prototyping, and stylized workflows, but final production assets may still benefit from manual cleanup in a dedicated texture tool.

Why is base color often white when a texture exists?

Because the texture already contains the visible color. White preserves it. Any other base color multiplies or tints the texture, which can be useful intentionally but often makes generated materials look wrong if applied accidentally.

Should I use opacity or transmission for glass?

Use transmission for glass, water, ice, crystals, and similar transparent materials. Opacity is better for simple fade transparency. For realistic transparent materials, keep opacity at 1 and control see-through behavior with transmission.

Can I export only the texture maps?

Yes. Use the texture archive export to download the available maps along with material property metadata.

Can Material Forge materials be used in WizardGenie?

Yes. Material Forge includes WizardGenie-oriented bundle support for workflows where the tool is opened from or used with WizardGenie.