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.
Related texture tools
Free, browser-based generators — same workflow, no upload to our servers.
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- Seamless TextureMake any image tileable online.Open tool