[FREE] AmbientCG to Unity material converter 2.0 (1800+ free PBR materials)

If you're not familiar with AmbientCG, it's a website with free (Patreon-supported) PBR materials. There are currently 1800 (and counting) materials there free! You can get high quality textures including the normal maps, height maps, smoothness/metallic channels, and AO. This is invaluable especially if you don't own or have access to something like Substance Designer.

But the formats are a little wonky for Unity (you need to invert the roughness, etc), so it takes a couple minutes of work to prepare each material for Unity. So I made a small tool to swizzle the textures. Note that you must download the PNG version, not the JPG version. For example, I downloaded this one: https://ambientcg.com/view?id=DiamondPlate006C

Then go into Unity and open the tool from the menu:


Click this button:


And voila:


It works in builtin, URP and HDRP (and potentially some custom shaders too, if they use the same naming scheme and texture formats). It might still have some bugs. If a material doesn't work, post here and I will see what I can do.

GitLab Project
Readme
Direct download for the zip

 

I'll bump this once since I spent like 6 hours on it.

It supports 3 modes. The default mode will take the albedo, normal, metalness, roughness, and ambient occlusion textures, swizzle them up into only 3 textures (for performance), fix import settings, and generate materials (screenshots are after importing into HDRP):



The height map mode adds the displacement map. In HDRP, you can choose between vertex displacement (tesselation AFAIK) and parallax occlusion mapping. Builtin/URP only have parallax mapping. Many materials in the AmbientCG catalog won't need this, but on some it looks tremendous:



The smoothness-in-albedo mode is faster since it only has 2 textures instead of 3. It's good for smooth surfaces, but can only be "all metallic" or "all non-metallic" so won't work for stuff like painted metal. It also lacks occlusion, which can make it seem flat:




Also note that it combines the masks for best performance and applies the correct import settings (sRGB vs non-sRGB) to all the textures. This can make a big difference in material accuracy/quality. And yes, the workflow is actually as easy as selecting a single zip file.

 

Looks great!

 

Another bump. BTW I edited it on Wedensday, so if you downloaded it and are having some problems, you can re-download.

Someday I will get an asset store account and upload this the right way, but I don't know if I legally can do that without getting all sorts of tax IDs, possibly in 2 countries. Apologies if you're looking for a "real" asset; for now the best I can do is this or GitLab.

 

Thank you for this!! Was curious if something like this existed, and to my surprise it was created this month

 

Thanks for the hint with the website, looks great!

 

New version has a no-normal-map mode which allows you to import just the smoothness and albedo and use a single texture map. This works just fine for stuff like plastic, sanded wood, etc. Basically anything flat or close to flat and non-metallic (or fully metallic and not scratched, but most of the metal materials have some scratching, so it doesn't work as well).

 

Finally got around to uploading it to the asset store. It's in the queue, so hopefully next month or so it'll be available there.

EDIT: it got denied because it has a trademark in the name. you can always download it from GitLab: https://gitlab.com/burningmime/ambientcg-to-unity

 

Very helpful. Thank you very much.

 

Just a bump since I mentioned it in the tutorial for my other asset.

Also, it now has a readme!

 

This is going to be so helpful - I just discovered ambientCG and tried using the materials in Unity with not much success...
Cloned your repo and opened as Unity project - and it just works! Thank you!

I wasn't quite sure how to add it to my project (a level editor) so just dragged the "AmbientCG Importer" folder into my assets - and there it was!

You might want to add that to your readme for others that, like me, expect things to be more difficult than they are!!

 

This community is a little bit greater because of you, thank you! If one day you sell tools like this in the asset store I will pay for it !