PBR Material Dump Tool

A CScharp program for converting PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials into optimized dump files for faster loading in Vulkan rendering environments.

Quick Start

To quickly start the conversion process, run the following command in your terminal or command prompt:

START MaterialDumpTool.exe --dir PATH_TO_WORKSPACE

Where PATH_TO_WORKSPACE is the directory containing the PBR materials to be converted.

Backstory

Rendering large PBR materials (e.g., 2024x2024 resolution) can result in slower load times in Vulkan applications. To alleviate this, the PBR Material Dump Tool converts these large assets into smaller dump files, optimizing them for quicker rendering.

Software Architecture

The application follows a structured conversion pipeline for transforming high-resolution PBR materials into various downscaled sizes for performance optimization.

Prerequisites

Before using the tool, download the required PBR materials for conversion.

Material Name	Example Filename
Albedo	pbrmat1_albedo.png
Ambient Occlusion	pbrmat1_ao.png
Height	pbrmat1_height.png
Normal (OpenGL)	pbrmat1_normal-ogl.png
Preview	pbrmat1_preview.png
Roughness	pbrmat1_roughness.png

Getting Started

Ensure you have placed the list of PBR materials inside your workspace directory. The initial structure should look like this:

Initial Folder Structure

├── pbrmat1
│   ├── pbrmat1_albedo.png
│   ├── pbrmat1_ao.png
│   ├── pbrmat1_height.png
│   ├── pbrmat1_normal-ogl.png
│   ├── pbrmat1_preview.png
│   └── pbrmat1_roughness.png
├── pbrmat2
│   └── ...
├── pbrmatN

Start the Conversion Process

To begin converting the PBR materials into optimized dump files, run:

START MaterialDumpTool.exe --dir PATH_TO_WORKSPACE

Where PATH_TO_WORKSPACE is the directory where your PBR materials are stored.

Folder Structure After Conversion

After running the conversion tool, you should see a _dump directory with downscaled versions of the original PBR materials at various resolutions:

├── _dump
│   ├── pbrmat1
│       ├── 8x8
│           ├── pbrmat1_albedo.png
│           ├── pbrmat1_ao.png
│           ├── pbrmat1_height.png
│           ├── pbrmat1_metallic.png
│           ├── pbrmat1_normal-ogl.png
│           └── pbrmat1_roughness.png
│       ├── 16x16
│           └── ...
│       ├── 32x32
│           └── ...
│       ├── 64x64
│           └── ...
│       ├── 128x128
│           └── ...
│       ├── 256x256
│           └── ...
│       ├── 1024x1024
│           └── ...
│       ├── 2024x2024
│           └── ...
│   └── pbrmatN

Example Sources for PBR Materials

You can download PBR material examples from websites like:

• TextureCan
• CC0-Textures

Open Issues

• Inconsistent naming conventions for ambient occlusion, albedo, and metallic roughness files.
• Large files should be split into smaller chunks for better handling and processing.