100 Roughness Imperfection — VOL 01

Roughness is the channel that decides whether a material looks photographed or rendered. A surface with one flat roughness value reads as plastic no matter how good the albedo above it is; break that value up with real grime, fingerprints, water spotting and polish wear and the same material becomes convincing in a single step. This pack is 100 tileable roughness maps captured from real-world surfaces, for exactly that job.

What you get

• ✓100 tileable roughness maps
• ✓4K resolution, in PNG
• ✓Captured from real surfaces rather than generated procedurally
• ✓A preview image for every map

How to use them

Drop a map into the roughness input of any material and it tiles in both axes, so one map can cover a floor or a wall without a visible seam. They are not restricted to roughness either — the same greyscale data works as a mask for a dirt layer, as a subtle height break-up under a smooth material, as opacity for a decal pass, or as a driver for anything you want to vary across a surface. In Substance Painter they sit naturally as a greyscale fill layer with a levels adjustment on top, which is the quickest way to dial the contrast down to what a specific material actually does.

The value in a captured map rather than a procedural one is the irregularity. Generated noise is even by construction; a real surface has a patch that was wiped, a corner that never was, and a run where something was dragged across it. That unevenness is what a viewer reads as history.

One thing to watch. These are roughness maps, so a specular-gloss pipeline needs them inverted before they behave correctly. A metallic-roughness workflow takes them as they are.

Made by Milad Kambari and Mirage3Dart.