Generate-then-Decompose PBR Material (CHORD)

Properties

family

3d

modality

text -> image (flat-lit texture) -> PBR map set (base color, normal, height, roughness, metalness)

whyMultiModel

Generating a plausible texture and estimating physically accurate SVBRDF channels (base color, normal, height, roughness, metalness) from it are different learned tasks; CHORD is a dedicated decomposition/estimation model chained after a separate text-to-image generator rather than one model doing both.

steps

[object Object], [object Object], [object Object]

controls

text prompt for the base texture, optional lineart/height conditioning input, group bypass toggles to run texture-gen and CHORD stages independently or feed in a user-provided texture directly to CHORD

exampleStack

Z-Image-Turbo (text to tileable texture) -> Ubisoft CHORD (SVBRDF decomposition) -> ChordNormalToHeight (height map)

useCases

[rapid PBR material authoring for game engines and DCC tools][converting AI-generated textures into production-ready material sets][iterating on material ideas without manual SVBRDF capture]

pitfalls

CHORD is released under a research-only license limiting production use; decomposition quality depends on the flatness/lighting of the generated source texture, poorly lit or shaded input textures produce inaccurate roughness/metalness estimates

source

ComfyUI official blog: Ubisoft Open-Sources the CHORD Model and ComfyUI Nodes for End-to-End PBR Material Generation (example workflow: chord_zimage_turbo_t2i_image_to_material.json)