How to make PBR materials for Second Life

Second Life's PBR materials follow the glTF standard. A material is an inventory item made of up to four textures plus a few numbers, and it looks right under any lighting.

What you need

• A current Second Life viewer
• Texture maps from Substance Painter, Blender or another texturing program

Steps

1. Make the four maps. Base colour (with transparency in its alpha if needed), normal (OpenGL), one combined texture with occlusion in red, roughness in green and metallic in blue, and optionally emissive.
2. Create the material. In the viewer choose Build > Upload > Material, or create a new material in your inventory, and load the textures into its slots.
3. Or upload a glTF file. A .gltf or .glb file exported from Blender or Painter can be uploaded as a material in one go.
4. Set the numbers. Adjust roughness and metallic factors, alpha mode (opaque, blend or mask) and double-sidedness.
5. Apply it. Edit the garment, select a face and drop the material on it, or pick it in the texture tab under PBR.
6. Add a fallback. Residents on old viewers see the Blinn-Phong textures instead. Set diffuse, normal and specular maps too if you want them to see something sensible.

Tips

• Fabric is almost never metallic: leave metallic at 0 and work with roughness.
• Check the garment in several environments; PBR depends on reflections.
• A texture changer HUD can switch whole PBR materials, not only colours.

Next

• How to texture clothing in Substance Painter for Second Life
• How to make a texture changer HUD for Second Life

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.