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Description

texLab — PBR Texture Packing for Unreal Engine

texLab is an Editor-only Unreal Engine plugin for packing PBR texture maps directly inside the Unreal Editor.

Pack inside the Unreal Editor — no Photoshop or Substance re-export just to test a channel layout. Native C++ plugin.

Turn individual maps — Base Color, Normal, AO, Roughness, Metallic, Height, masks, and more — into production-ready texture packs such as ORM + Normal etc. Need to work in reverse? Unpack vendor atlases back into individual maps with a full in-Editor round-trip.

What you see in the preview is what gets written to disk.
Required plugins: DataValidation (Data Validation).

Verified on Unreal Engine 5.7 and 5.8

What You Get

  • Manual Mode — Pack one material at a time with Sources, a visual pack graph, and live preview.

  • Export Preview — Compare Working, Encoded (BC7/BC5 approximation), Delta, and Split Channel views before exporting.

  • Channel Graph — Adjust Contrast, Invert, and Levels before committing your pack.

  • Safe & Compact Strategies — Use independent channels such as ORM + BC5 Normal, or denser Compact layouts such as GRAH + NMG. Clear strategy badges show exactly what each mode does.

  • Create Outputs — Generate packed textures, optionally create a Material and Material Instance, or Add to an existing Material.

  • Provenance — Store the packing strategy, source maps, and notes directly on the asset using Asset User Data.

  • Seamless Bake — Bake edge cleanup directly into the output texels in Pack mode.

  • Streaming Virtual Textures — Generate SVT outputs with the appropriate Virtual Texture samplers in material graph.

  • Unpack — Extract packed textures back into individual maps for a complete in-Editor round-trip.

  • Batch Mode — Process entire folders with Scan, Rebuild Groups, Suggestions, Validate, and chunked Execute workflows.

  • Library — Use built-in presets or create your own JSON-based presets with import/export support.

  • Semantics — Define filename rules and test matches, such as R → Roughness or M → Metallic.

  • Material Builder — Connect existing packed textures to a material template without repacking them.

  • In-Editor Help & Quick Start — Get up and running in roughly five minutes.

  • Demo Content — Explore the included texture examples in /texLab/texLabDemo/, including Magma, Knit, Gold etc.

Defaults That Protect Your Project

texLab is designed to make destructive mistakes difficult.

  • Create New — Source textures are never overwritten.

  • Validate Before Execute — Run a dry pass with match checks, estimated savings, and a complete file operation plan before anything is written.

  • Semantic Resolution — Packed acronyms are not blindly interpreted from letter order. texLab resolves them through its semantic database and Library presets.

Quick Start

  1. Enable texLab: Edit → Plugins.

  2. Tools → texLab.

  3. In the Content Browser, navigate to /texLab/texLabDemo/Textures/....

  4. Right-click a texture set and select Send to texLab.

  5. Choose a Safe packing strategy.

  6. Check the Encoded preview.

  7. Click Create Outputs.

  8. Open the resulting texture and check Details → Asset User Data to see its provenance.

Documentation: https://docs.page/armasonix/texLabDocs
Support: [email protected]
Full Video Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rblsIZo2GU

The included demo textures are provided to demonstrate the workflow and learn the pipeline.

Included formats

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