About PBR Forge

What PBR Forge is

PBR Forge is a free, browser-based texture generator for physically based rendering. You give it an image — a photograph of a material, a hand-painted texture, a pixel-art sprite, an icon — and it produces the full set of maps a modern renderer expects: normal, height, ambient occlusion, roughness, metallic, emissive, opacity, and a signed distance field. Maps can be exported individually or as a complete PBR pack in a single ZIP, with normal maps written in either OpenGL (Y+) or DirectX (Y-) orientation so they drop straight into your engine.

The output is aimed at real production work: Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, Blender, Three.js, Babylon.js, Phaser, and Pixi.js all consume it without conversion. Textures larger than your GPU’s maximum texture size are exported in tiles rather than silently downscaled.

How it works

Everything runs on your own GPU through WebGL 2.0 fragment shaders. There is no upload step and no render queue: the maps are recomputed as you drag a slider, and a lit 2D preview plus a real-time 3D preview (plane, sphere, cube, cylinder) show the result under light you can move.

Two pipelines sit behind that. Texture mode separates the image into frequency bands to recover surface height from luminance — the right model for brick, stone, wood, fabric, and other opaque materials. Sprite mode instead derives shape from the alpha channel using the Jump Flood Algorithm, which keeps pixel-art edges crisp instead of smearing them. PBR Forge picks the mode that fits your image automatically, and you can override it at any time.

Who it is for

Game developers, 3D and technical artists, pixel-art creators, and anyone who needs PBR-ready maps without installing desktop software or learning a node graph. Solo developers and small studios use it as their entire texturing pipeline; larger teams tend to use it for quick passes, prototypes, and sprite lighting where a full material authoring suite would be overkill.

Principles

• • Your work stays yours. Images are processed entirely on your device. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or inspected — not by us, not by anyone else. See the Privacy Policy for the details.
• • No account, no friction. The generator requires no sign-up, and it is free to use today.
• • Built in the open. The roadmap and changelog are public, and the feedback board decides much of what gets built next.

Who builds it

PBR Forge is independent software built and operated by Jad Haidar, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is not backed by a publisher or an engine vendor, which is why the tool stays small, fast, and focused on one job rather than growing into a suite.

Questions, bug reports, and feature requests all reach the same person. Write to support@pbrforge.com, use the contact page, or post on the feedback board.