Texture Maps
Base color of the surface
Surface detail (blue-ish image)
Grayscale: white = rough
Grayscale: white = metal
Grayscale shadow map
Click and drag to rotate. Scroll to zoom. Right-click to pan.
How to Preview PBR Materials Online
- 1
Upload Your Texture Maps
Drag and drop or browse to upload your PBR texture maps into the corresponding slots: albedo (base color), normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion. PNG is recommended for normal and roughness maps to avoid compression artifacts. - 2
Select a Preview Shape
Choose a 3D shape that matches your intended surface. Use a sphere for organic materials like skin or stone, a cube for architectural textures like brick or tile, or a plane for flat surfaces like fabric or wallpaper. - 3
Adjust Material Parameters
Fine-tune the tiling (Repeat X/Y) to test seamless repetition. Adjust the normal map intensity to control surface detail strength. Modify roughness and metallic values if you do not have dedicated maps for those channels. - 4
Inspect Under Different Lighting
Rotate the camera around the model to observe how the material responds to different viewing angles and lighting directions. Check for correct specular highlights on metallic areas and proper shadow detail in ambient occlusion zones.
Common Use Cases
Game Asset Development
Architectural Visualization
Texture Library Quality Control
Educational and Learning Purposes
Understanding PBR Materials and Texture Maps
Physically Based Rendering (PBR) is the industry-standard approach for creating realistic materials in 3D applications. PBR materials use a set of texture maps that describe how light interacts with a surface, producing consistent and predictable results across different lighting conditions and rendering engines.
Core Texture Maps
- Albedo (Base Color): The base color of the surface without any lighting or shadow information. This map defines the diffuse color that the material reflects.
- Normal Map: Encodes surface detail as RGB data, simulating bumps, grooves, and fine geometry without adding extra polygons. Blue-dominant images indicate outward-facing normals.
- Roughness Map: A grayscale map where white represents rough surfaces (matte) and black represents smooth surfaces (glossy). Controls how sharply reflections appear.
- Metallic Map: A grayscale map where white indicates metal and black indicates non-metal (dielectric). Metals reflect their environment color, while non-metals reflect white light.
- Ambient Occlusion (AO): A grayscale map that darkens crevices and recessed areas where ambient light is occluded, adding depth and realism to the material.
The PBR Workflow
PBR follows an energy-conservation principle: a surface cannot reflect more light than it receives. The metallic-roughness workflow (used by glTF, Unreal Engine, Unity, and most game engines) separates materials into metallic and non-metallic, then uses roughness to control reflection sharpness. This produces physically accurate results that look correct in any lighting scenario.
Applications
PBR materials are used extensively in game development, film VFX, product visualization, architectural rendering, and virtual reality. Understanding how each map contributes to the final look allows artists to create convincing materials efficiently.
The PBR Material Previewer is a browser-based tool for inspecting physically based rendering texture maps on interactive 3D shapes. Upload your albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion maps, then view the combined result in real time without installing desktop software. Every texture is processed locally in your browser, so your files are never uploaded to a server.
Physically based rendering has become the standard shading model across game engines, film production, product visualization, and architectural rendering. The metallic-roughness workflow used by glTF, Unity, Unreal Engine, and Blender separates material properties into distinct texture channels, each controlling a specific aspect of light interaction. This previewer lets you validate each channel independently or together, adjust tiling to check seamless repetition, and modify normal map intensity to fine-tune surface detail. Whether you are building assets for a 3D model viewer pipeline or creating textures for a game environment, this tool provides instant visual feedback.
For related workflows, extract dominant colors from your albedo maps with the Image Color Extractor, convert between image formats using the Image Converter, or generate complementary color schemes with the Color Palette Generator. If you need to verify color contrast between material tones, the Contrast Checker can help ensure accessibility in UI elements that use your material colors.
How It Compares
Desktop PBR previewers like Marmoset Toolbag, Substance 3D Painter, and Quixel Mixer offer advanced features such as multi-layer materials, procedural blending, and custom lighting rigs. However, they require installation, often carry subscription costs, and demand capable hardware. This online PBR Material Previewer fills a different role: instant, zero-install inspection of individual texture map sets directly in the browser. It is ideal for quick quality checks, client reviews, and educational exploration without the overhead of launching a full 3D application.
Compared to other free online PBR viewers, FindUtils processes all textures client-side with no file uploads, no account requirements, and no usage limits. This makes it well-suited for artists who need to verify texture maps quickly during an active workflow or share a preview link with a collaborator without worrying about file privacy or storage quotas.