Material Studio (PBR Map Generator)

What this tool actually is

The name suggests a material editor — something that lets you tweak a StandardMaterial/GlassMaterial on a selected scene object, the way Maker does. It isn't that. Material Studio is a PBR texture map generator: you give it a diffuse image, and it derives a height, normal, specular, roughness, ambient occlusion, and edge map from it via 2D image-processing heuristics — then lets you preview the result on a sample mesh in an isolated sandbox scene. It never touches your actual running game scene.

Enabling it

Call attachDevTools(app) from @small-world/tools, and Material Studio opens as one of the docked Forge windows:

import { SmallWorld } from "@small-world/engine";
import { attachDevTools } from "@small-world/tools";

const app = new MyGame();
attachDevTools(app);
app.start();

Press Ctrl+Alt+G (or Cmd+Alt+G) to show/hide the Forge overlay.

Standalone page

A close relative lives at /tools/pbr-gen.html — it duplicates the same image-processing pipeline and UI inline (instead of importing the MaterialStudio class) and only reuses the 3D preview half (MaterialStudioApp) from the shared module. Treat it as a separately maintained fork, not a thin wrapper.

Loading a source image

Drag and drop an image onto the dropzone, click it to open a file picker dialog, or paste directly (Ctrl/Cmd+V while Material Studio is the topmost Forge window). PNG/JPG/WebP up to 8MB. If nothing is loaded, a bundled stone texture is used by default — falling back to a synthetic, procedural noise texture if even that fails to load.

Generating maps

A "Preset Profile" dropdown (Default, Stone, Metal, Wood) sets a starting point for seven groups of controls, each tuning one derived map:

• Height Map — blur radius, contrast, invert.
• Normal Map — bump strength, OpenGL/DirectX format, invert red channel.
• Specular Map — sigmoidal contrast and midpoint threshold.
• Roughness Map — gamma exponent.
• Ambient Occlusion — soft-shadow blur, crevice strength, intensity.
• Edge Map — contrast threshold and thickness.
• 3D Preview — metallic base and roughness override, which only affect the local preview, not any exported map.

Every control change reprocesses the image immediately (with a brief loading overlay). At higher "Working Max Resolution" settings (1024px or original size), this recomputation runs on the main thread and can noticeably stall the UI for a moment — the trade-off for not shipping a worker-based pipeline.

These are fast approximations, not baked PBR maps

Normal maps come from a Sobel gradient over the height map's luminance, not a real high-to-low-poly bake. Ambient occlusion is a Laplacian-crevice-plus-blur heuristic, not raytraced or SSAO. Specular/roughness are gamma/sigmoid curve transforms of the same height data. This is a genuinely useful quick start for a plausible-looking material, not a physically accurate map baker — don't expect studio-grade results from a single diffuse photo.

Preview and export

Switch between tabs to view a single map, the full grid of all seven, or a "Small World Engine Preview" — a live, auto-rotating sphere/cube/torus/plane, rendered with your generated maps on a StandardMaterial, in Material Studio's own isolated preview scene (it has nothing to do with your game's actual scene or objects).

Export is plain PNG, no bundling:

• Clicking a single map's canvas, or its download icon in the grid view, saves that one map as <filename>_<maptype>.png.
• Download All Maps triggers all six downloads (Height/Normal/Specular/Roughness/AO/Edge) in sequence — there is no zip bundling.

There is no material JSON export and no way to apply the result back to an object in your running scene — bringing the generated textures into your actual game is a manual step (load the downloaded PNGs like any other texture asset).

Limitations

• Only StandardMaterial is supported — there is no material type selector, and none of the engine's other material classes (Glass, Terrain, Phong, custom shaders, etc.) are represented anywhere in this tool.
• No scene integration. You cannot select and edit a live object/material — everything happens in an isolated preview sandbox.
• No persistence. Reopening the window always starts with the default image and default preset; nothing you configure survives a reload.
• PNG export only, no material configuration JSON, no zip bundling of the six maps.
• The generated maps are approximate, image-processing-based heuristics — see the warning above.