Today I present you a new tool for Blender Cycles: Map Builder.

Before explaining the tool, I am going to tell a situation that happens when achieving realism with procedural textures. In order to achieve realism, you need three maps: a roughness map, a normal map and a reflection map. To get these maps, you have to:

• Render the procedural texture
• Create the maps with an external program
• Import the maps into Blender

With the Map Builder tool, these steps are no longer necessary, as the maps are created right within Blender. Here is how it looks like:

To get the maps, simply plug the procedural texture into the Image Diffuse socket and tweak the parameters as needed, then plug the output maps into their respective sockets.

To add the tool to your project, follow these steps:

• Go to the File menu and click on Append
• Navigate to the blend file named ‘Map Builder’
• Then, do: NodeTree > Map Builder and click on ‘Append from Library’
• In the Node Editor, do: Add > Group > Map Builder

Note: you can also use this tool with an external image texture.

As a demonstration, I created a scene in which the tool is used extensively.

The tool can be downloaded here as well as the example scene.

With all that said, have fun with this tool and happy blending !