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Poliigon Material Converter Addon for Blender
Poliigon Material Converter Addon for Blender

Legacy Blender Addon

Updated over a week ago

The "Poliigon Material Converter" has been completely rewritten as the brand new Poliigon Blender Addon:

Legacy Material Converter:

With the release of Blender 4.0, this product is deprecated and no longer supported. In the meantime, you can still download the legacy material converter for blender 2.80 - 3.6.

Version 3.1.4 (View Changelog)
You can download the previous version 2 here.

How to install

  1. Download the material converter. (DO NOT extract the zip file, just note where it has been saved.)

  2. Open Blender then go to the edit menu -> user preferences

  3. Click on the Add-ons tab, then click Install Addon. 

  4. Navigate to where you saved the .zip file and select it. 

  5. Click on the check-box to enable the converter and, optionally, click on Save User Settings to have it always enabled on launch.

Important: Please make sure that all your downloaded materials are unzipped. Our material converter can't currently read .zip files.

Usage

For more information regarding using our converter please check out the Blender area of our Help Section for tutorials on subjects ranging from basic usage to more in-depth subjects.

Advanced Options

  • Import Mapping Options - By default, the converter will use our SimpleMapping node group in place of the Blender default mapping node. However, there are several other options available. Mosaic De-tiling will use an alternative mapping node designed to break up terrain repetition. You'll also find options for using generated coordinates or to use the default Blender mapping node.

  • Include Ambient Occlusion (AO) maps - If ambient occlusion maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup.

  • Include Displacement maps - If displacement maps are present with the detected materials, they will automatically be added to the material shader setup. Please note that some renderers only allow displacement via a modifier that must be applied to a 3d model. In such cases, the displacement map must be added manually, as the script only imports textures into a material shader.

  • Conform UV maps to image dimensions - For textures in a rectangular (non-square) format, this option will adjust the UVs for each map type to match the image dimensions. Please note that this feature does not work with all rendering engines and is disabled by default.

  • Use 16-bit maps - This will replace all 8-bit images with higher quality 16-bit versions when available and is disabled by default.

Complete materials

The material converter is designed to function only when it detects materials that have a complete set of maps and will give an error warning if one or more of these maps is missing. In order to form a complete material these four map types are required; COL (color), REFL (reflection), GLOSS, and NRM (normals).

Please note that some materials come with ALPHAMASKED files instead of a COL map and contain a transparency channel. These will automatically load in if a COL map is not detected.

Specialty maps

All other additional maps that may come with materials are considered specialty and not required for the converter to work. However, some of these are directly supported such as AO, Displacement, and alphamasked maps.

Metal materials

When it comes to metal materials Poliigon offers two different workflows; metalness and specular. Due to the way Blender's Principled Shader works for metallic materials the specular workflow really doesn't work well therefore the Converter will insist you download the metalness workflow textures.

Support

If you encounter any bugs while using the converter then please contact our support team with the details at support@poliigon.com. Thanks!

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