Frequently Asked Questions
A metallic (metalness) map is a grayscale mask that tells the renderer which parts of a surface are raw metal and which are not. In a physically based workflow it is effectively binary: white for metal, black for everything else.
Almost never. Mid-grey metalness is physically meaningless and mostly produces muddy shading. Keep the mask close to pure black and white — use Softness only to smooth the transition across a few pixels so the edge does not alias.
Raw metals are nearly colourless while painted, rusted or dirty areas keep saturation. If your source photo has colourful non-metal regions that are just as bright as the metal, switch the detection mode to Desaturation and the mask separates them far more cleanly.
Metal needs a roughness map to look like anything. Polished chrome sits near 0.1, brushed aluminium around 0.3–0.4, and weathered or cast metal 0.5 and up. Generate the matching map with our roughness map generator and use both together.
No. Everything runs on your GPU through WebGL inside your browser. Your image never leaves your device and nothing is stored on a server.