Using Superellipse PBR Textures in Blender / Cycles

This guide covers installing the Superellipse PBR Importer addon and loading your texture packs into Blender as fully wired Cycles Principled BSDF materials — in seconds.

What You'll Need

Before getting started, make sure you have:

• Blender 4.2 or newer (recommended — enables drag-and-drop install)
• Cycles render engine (set in Render Properties)
• Windows or macOS
• The Superellipse PBR Importer for Blender. Download it here

Note

The plugin is tested and built in Blender 5.1 for Windows

Why the Plugin Exists

Blender has no native PBR importer. When you purchase a Superellipse texture pack, you receive a folder of image maps — basecolor, roughness, metallic, normal, AO, height, and more. Without the plugin, turning those into a properly configured Cycles material means manually creating Image Texture nodes, setting colour spaces on each one, wiring every connection to the Principled BSDF, building AO compositing, fine tuning and adding displacement chains from scratch.

The Superellipse PBR Importer reduces the entire process to two clicks: run the importer, select a folder, done.

Step 1 — Install the Addon - Drag and drop

Once downloaded, simply drag Superellipse_PBR_Importer_(version).zip directly onto the Blender window. A small dialog will appear — click OK to confirm installation. The addon is installed and enabled immediately.

Alternative  — manual install

1. Unzip the downloaded folder
2. Go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons
3. Click Install from File
4. Select Superellipse_PBR_Importer_Blender.py
5. Tick the checkbox next to Superellipse PBR Importer to enable it

After installation a welcome popup confirms the addon is ready and shows you where to find it.

Step 2 — Import a Material

There are two ways to open the importer:

• File > Import > Superellipse PBR (Cycles)
• Or even quicker - Press N in the 3D Viewport to open the sidebar, then click the Superellipse tab and hit Single Import

A file browser opens. Navigate to your unzipped Superellipse texture folder, once inside the folder click Accept. The importer will process all the maps within.

An options dialog appears before the material is built:

• Enable Displacement — wires the height map to the Cycles Displacement output. Requires a Subdivision Surface modifier on the object to be visible. Leave ticked for most materials; untick for flat or low-poly objects where you don't need displacement.
  
• Assign to Active Object — automatically applies the new material to the currently selected object. Leave ticked and the material is ready to preview immediately after import.

Click OK. The plugin builds the full node graph and a success popup confirms the result — showing the material name, how many channels were wired, and whether it was assigned to your object.

Housekeeping note: Keep your unzipped texture folders in a permanent location before importing. The material references the original file paths at import time — moving them afterwards will disconnect the textures.

Step 3 — View and Edit the Node Graph

To inspect or adjust the material, open the Shader Editor:

• Click the editor type icon (top-left of any panel) and select Shader Editor
• Or hover over any panel and press Shift + F3

Make sure the object with the material is selected. All nodes are named with the SE_ prefix so they're easy to identify. The graph runs left to right:

• SE_TexCoord → SE_Mapping — controls UV tiling for all maps simultaneously. Select SE_Mapping and adjust Scale, Rotation, or Location to tile or offset every map at once.
• SE_BaseColor, SE_Roughness, SE_Metallic etc — individual Image Texture nodes, one per map
• SE_CC_Base, SE_CC_Rough — BrightContrast adjustment nodes on base colour and roughness. Use these to non-destructively brighten or adjust contrast without touching the texture file.
• SE_AO_Mix — multiplies ambient occlusion into base colour for baked-in shadowing
• SE_NormalMap — converts the normal texture to tangent-space vectors before connecting to the Principled BSDF
• SE_Displacement — connects the height map to the Material Output Displacement socket
• SE_Principled — the main Principled BSDF shader. All maps feed into this node.

Step 4 — Batch Import

To import multiple texture sets at once, go to File > Import > Superellipse PBR Batch (Cycles), or use the Batch Import button in the N-sidebar Superellipse tab.

A file browser opens with the instruction: Navigate INTO the parent folder containing the unzipped Superellipse folders, so that sets are listed and visible. (Once here, DO NOT click a folder to highlight it, as the button will then take you one layer deeper). Whilst in the parent folder, and with nothing selected, click "Import Sets".

The plugin scans every Superellipse subfolder it finds and imports them all.

A summary popup appears when complete, listing every material created with a ✓ or ✗ per set. Find all created materials in Material Properties > Browse Material.

Tips & Best Practices

Controlling Tiling — SE_Mapping

All image texture nodes connect to a single SE_Mapping node. Select it in the Shader Editor and adjust Scale to tile every map simultaneously — you never need to update each texture node individually. For a 2×2 tile, set X and Y scale to 2. Rotation and Location offset the entire set together as well.

Glass Materials — Transmission and Colour

For glass texture sets, the plugin automatically routes the transmission colour map to Base Color (the tint of the glass) and wires the transmission weight map through a SE_CC_TransWeight node before the Principled BSDF. To control how opaque or tinted the glass looks:

• Adjust Brightness on SE_CC_TransWeight — higher brightness = more transparent
• Adjust Brightness on SE_CC_Base — controls the intensity of the colour tint
• Set Roughness low (0.0–0.05) for clear glass; higher values produce frosted or satin glass
• IOR is set to 1.5 by default — standard glass. Increase to 1.7 for denser glass, 1.33 for water

For best results in Cycles, go to Render Properties > Light Paths and set Transmission bounces to at least 8. Low bounce counts cause glass to render dark.

Dichroic Glass — Iridescent Colour Shift

When the folder name contains the word dichroic, the plugin automatically sets Coat IOR to 4.0 and Coat Weight to 1.0 on the Principled BSDF. This creates the characteristic iridescent colour-shift effect. Adjust the Coat IOR value to control the intensity of the shift — lower values reduce it, higher values increase it. The Coat Roughness value controls whether the iridescence looks sharp or spread.

Clearcoat — Carbon Fibre and Lacquered Surfaces

Materials like carbon fibre typically include clearcoat weight and clearcoat roughness maps. These wire to Coat Weight and Coat Roughness on the Principled BSDF. To tune the effect:

• If no clearcoat weight map is present, the plugin defaults to Coat Weight 0.9 — adjust this directly on SE_Principled
• Lower Coat Roughness for a high-gloss lacquer look; raise it for a satin or matte clear coat
• Coat IOR defaults to 1.5 — increase to 2.0+ for a glassier, more pronounced reflection

Anisotropic Reflections — Brushed Metal

When an anisotropic angle map is detected without a weight map, the plugin defaults Anisotropic to 0.6. To adjust:

• Increase the Anisotropic value on SE_Principled toward 1.0 for stronger elongated highlights
• The SE_AnisoAngle texture drives the rotation direction of the highlights — this creates the brushed or radial pattern
• If the direction looks wrong, your object may need a correctly oriented UV map — anisotropic rotation is UV-dependent in Cycles

Subsurface Scattering — Skin, Wax, Marble

SSS materials wire subsurface weight and colour maps to the Principled BSDF Subsurface inputs. The plugin sets default radius values as a starting point — adjust these on SE_Principled per material type:

• Subsurface Radius — controls scatter distance per RGB channel. Skin typically uses (1.0, 0.2, 0.1) — red scatters furthest, blue barely. Marble or wax uses more even values like (0.5, 0.5, 0.4)
• Subsurface Scale — overall multiplier. Increase for deeper, more visible scattering; decrease for subtle, near-surface scatter only
• Subsurface Weight map — if you find the SSS effect too strong or too subtle, add a BrightContrast node between SE_SSSWeight and the Principled socket to fine-tune

Displacement — Getting Clean Results in Cycles

Unlike Redshift's render-time adaptive tessellation, Cycles displaces actual geometry. To get clean results without excessive polygon counts:

1. Add a Subdivision Surface modifier to your object
2. In Render Properties > Feature Set, switch to Experimental
3. On the Subdivision Surface modifier, enable Adaptive Subdivision — Cycles will now subdivide at render time based on camera distance, similar to Redshift's behaviour
4. Set the Dicing Rate in Render Properties to control quality — lower = finer, higher = faster

The displacement scale defaults to 0.1. Adjust on the SE_Displacement node in the Shader Editor — lower for subtle surface texture, higher for strong depth. The midlevel is set to 0.5 for Substance-standard maps, or 0.0 for fabric scans.

Opacity / Transparency

When an opacity map is detected, the plugin wires it to the Alpha socket and sets the material blend mode to BLEND for EEVEE viewport compatibility. In Cycles, this works automatically — no additional settings needed. If transparency looks incorrect in the viewport, ensure your viewport shading is set to Material Preview or Rendered mode, not Solid.

Emission Materials

The plugin always sets Emission Strength to 0.0 when no emission map is present, preventing accidental glow on non-emissive materials. When an emission map is detected, Strength is set to 1.0 automatically. Adjust the Emission Strength value on SE_Principled to control how bright the emission appears in the render.

Supported Maps

The plugin automatically detects and wires the following maps when present:

Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Height / Displacement, Opacity, Emission, Specular, Anisotropic Weight, Anisotropic Angle, Clearcoat Weight, Clearcoat Colour, Clearcoat Roughness, Transmission Weight, Transmission Colour, Subsurface Weight, Subsurface Colour

Supported file formats: .png .jpg .jpeg .tif .tiff .exr .hdr

Note on EXR and HDR files: Blender auto-sets a Linear colour space for these formats on colour maps. If a colour EXR map looks washed out after import, select the SE_BaseColor or SE_Emission node and change its Color Space from Non-Color to Linear or Linear Rec.709.

Troubleshooting

The addon doesn't appear in File > Import — go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons and confirm Superellipse PBR Importer is listed and ticked. If it appears but is greyed out, try disabling and re-enabling it. If it doesn't appear at all, reinstall from the .zip or .py file.

No maps found after selecting a folder — confirm your texture filenames haven't been renamed since download. The plugin matches map types from the last underscore-separated token in the filename — filenames like ProductName_basecolor_4K.png are expected. Open Window > Toggle System Console to see which files were scanned and skipped.

Material appears pink or textures are missing — the material stores absolute file paths at import time. If you've moved, renamed, or deleted the texture folder since importing, Blender can no longer find the images. Re-run the importer pointing to the new folder location.

Displacement isn't visible in renders — displacement requires real geometry. Add a Subdivision Surface modifier to your object and enable Experimental feature set in Render Properties. See the Displacement section above for the full setup.

Glass appears dark or black in renders — low light bounce counts cause this. Go to Render Properties > Light Paths and increase Transmission bounces to 8 or higher. Also confirm Roughness is set low (under 0.05) for clear glass.

Batch import finds no sets — the batch tool scans one level of subfolders. Make sure you navigate INTO the parent folder (so the subfolders are visible in the browser) before clicking Import Sets, and that you haven't clicked into any individual texture folder. See the Batch Import section above.

The success popup says material was not assigned — either no object was selected when you ran the import, or Assign to Active Object was unticked. Find the material in Material Properties > Browse Material and assign it manually by selecting your object and clicking the material name in the list.

Questions?

If you run into anything not covered here, reach out at support@superellipse.co and include the name of the texture pack you were importing along with your Blender version.