How to Create Metal Textures

📌 Textures used: Poly Metal Texture Collection

This guide will walk you through the process of using Poly’s AI to generate metal textures. We’ll focus specifically on creating metal textures for various applications, and we’ll provide examples of effective prompts that will help you achieve the best results.

Step 1: Creating Patches

To begin, navigate to the Make Patches section in Poly. Create a detailed text prompt that describes the metal texture you want to generate. Remember to include information about the metal’s category, styles, types, descriptors, environment, and detail. Here are some examples of good prompts for metal textures:

• "Brushed aluminum metal surface, clean and shiny, straight parallel lines, industrial setting, high definition"
• "Rusty and weathered iron metal, corroded surface with brown and orange tones, old machinery, detailed texture"
• "Bronze metal, warm brown and orange tones, aged and worn surface, classic and antique appearance, suitable for sculptures and architectural elements, detailed texture"

Enter your prompt and press enter. In a few seconds, you’ll see four high-quality patches to choose from. Iterate as many times as you want until you find a patch that you like, and then confirm your selection. The patches generated from the example prompts can be seen below:

Image 1: The prompt used and the patches that were generated for a brushed aluminum texture. We selected the top right patch.

Image 2: The prompt used and the patches that were generated for a rusty iron texture. We selected the bottom right patch.

Image 3: The prompt used and the patches that were generated for a bronze texture. We selected the top left patch.

Step 2: Making the Texture Seamless and Scaling

Now that you have a low-resolution texture patch, navigate to the Make Seamless toolbar to create a seamless, tileable texture. For metal textures, the AI should be able to expand the surface area of your patch without causing unwanted artifacts or seams. The default 80% scale should work well for most metal textures, but feel free to experiment with other values if necessary.

Step 3: Upscaling the Texture

If you need to upscale your texture, navigate to Upscale Texture and press enter. In less than 10 seconds, the upscaling process will complete, and your texture will be in 1K, 2K, 4K, or 8K HD resolution.

Step 4: Generating PBR Maps

The final step is to add PBR maps to your metal texture. Navigate to Generate PBR Maps to get started. Select the most suitable material type for your metal texture. For metal, you may want to experiment with options like Dramatic, Shiny, or Matte. Keep in mind that:

• Dramatic works best for textures with noticeable amounts of displacement, such as rough or corroded metal surfaces.
• Shiny is ideal for metal surfaces with a natural sheen and little to no displacement, resulting in a bright, reflective effect.
• Matte is suitable for flatter metal surfaces with fewer irregularities; it produces a smooth and gently lit appearance.

Once you’ve selected the appropriate material type, the PBR maps will be added to your view. You can preview your seamless metal texture on a sphere, or adjust the Render and View options for a better preview before downloading your texture in either 8-bit JPG or 32-bit EXR format.

By following these steps and crafting detailed prompts, you can use Poly’s AI to generate high-quality, seamless metal textures for a wide range of applications, from game assets to architectural renderings.

Image 4: The Shiny PBR map with the height map disabled was used to create this brushed aluminum texture.

Image 5: The Matte PBR map was used to create this rusty iron texture.

Image 6: The Shiny PBR map with the height map disabled was used to create this bronze texture.