Chord: Chain of Rendering Decomposition for PBR Material Estimation from Generated Texture images

Zhi Ying1*, Boxiang Rong2*, Jingyu Wang, 2 Maoyuan Xu1
Ubisoft La Forge1, ETH Zürich2
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
*Equal Contribution
Paper Supplementary arXiv Code 🤗 Demo

PBR materials generated by our method.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a generate-and-estimate framework to produce high-quality SVBRDF channels for physically-based rendering of materials. In the generation stage, we leverage the diverse conditioning techniques of text-to-image models to synthesize tileable texture images with creative control. In the estimation stage, we introduce a chain-of-rendering-decomposition (Chord) scheme, which sequentially predicts SVBRDF channels by feeding previously extracted representations into a single-step, image-conditioned diffusion model. Our material estimation method demonstrates strong robustness on both generated textures and in-the-wild photographs. Moreover, we showcase the flexibility of our entire framework across diverse applications, including text-to-material, image-to-material, structure-guided generation, and material editing.

Method Overview

Stage 1: Tileable texture image ($ I_\text{RGB} $) generation using a fine-tuned diffusion model, controllable via user guidance (text prompts, reference images, or other control types).

Stage 2: Material estimation predicts SVBRDF channels sequentially:

  1. Basecolor $\hat{b}$.
  2. Normal $\hat{n}$ (with height $\hat{h}$ derived via normal integration).
  3. Roughness $\hat{r}$ and metalness $\hat{m}$.
Each step's input is computed from previous outputs. LEGO-conditioning provides modality-specific weights while maintaining shared backbone weights for alignment. Details of LEGO-conditioning are provided in Section 4.2.1.

Material Estimation Comparisons



$\dagger$: re-trained on our dataset, $\ast$: author-provided weights.

Applications



Oak Tree Texture
⇨

Text to Material

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Image to Material

⇨

Structure-controlled Generation

Before
+Lava
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Material Editing

Before
Edited
⇨

Adding 🍌

Before
+Banana

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ying2025chord,
    author = {Ying, Zhi and Rong, Boxiang and Wang, Jingyu and Xu, Maoyuan},
    title = {Chord: Chain of Rendering Decomposition for PBR Material Estimation from Generated Texture Images},
    year = {2025},
    isbn = {9798400721373},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3757377.3763848},
    doi = {10.1145/3757377.3763848},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Conference Papers},
    articleno = {164},
    numpages = {11},
    keywords = {Appearance Modeling, Material Generation, Texture Synthesis, SVBRDF, Image-conditional Diffusion Models},
    series = {SA Conference Papers '25}
}