How To Pack Roughness, Metallic, and AO Maps
Pack roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion maps into one texture and understand the practical steps behind ORM, RMA, and related workflows.
Why these three maps are packed together
Roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion are typically grayscale maps and are strong candidates for channel packing. Combining them reduces texture fetches and keeps related material data together.
This is why searches around ORM map creation, RMA textures, and roughness-metallic packing are so common in real-time art pipelines.
How to choose the channel order
The correct order depends on the engine, shader, and studio convention. Some pipelines expect ORM, others expect RMA or RMO, and the wrong order can make a material look broken even when the source maps are correct.
The safest approach is to inspect each grayscale map first, then pack them deliberately into the target layout instead of trusting filenames alone.
What to validate before export
Check that each map is truly grayscale, that no channel contains unexpected color data, and that the intended output texture matches the naming and material conventions of the target project.
For repeated production work, the manual workflow usually evolves into a batch packing step so that every texture set follows the same rule set.