Frequently Asked Questions
A roughness map is a grayscale PBR texture that tells the renderer how sharp or blurred reflections are across a surface. Black is a perfect mirror, white is completely matte, and everything between controls how tight the specular highlight stays.
Upload a photo or albedo texture, pick a material preset, and the generator converts brightness into roughness. "Bright = Smooth" is on by default because highlights in a photo usually sit on the glossiest parts. Fine-tune with contrast, smoothing and the min/max output range, then download the PNG.
Real materials almost never reach 0.0 or 1.0 roughness. Clamping the output to a band like 0.15–0.95 keeps the darkest areas from turning into mirrors and the lightest from going completely flat, which is the single biggest reason converted photos look wrong in a game engine.
They are inverses of the same property. Metallic/roughness workflows (Unreal, Unity URP, Blender, glTF) use roughness, while older specular/glossiness workflows use glossiness. If your engine wants glossiness, turn off "Bright = Smooth" to flip the map.
No. The whole generator runs on your GPU through WebGL in your own browser. Your image never leaves your device, and nothing is stored.