Lily Surface Scrapper: Automatically import PBR materials

Besides furniture models for your interior visualization projects in Blender, you all have to build a vast library of PBR materials to speed up your production workflow. Having those materials ready for use is a challenge because you will have to download all maps and set up a new surface in Blender every time.

Wouldnt be great to have a way to automatically have new material in Blender straight from online sources like CC0Textures, Texture Haven, or cgbookcase?

There is a free Add-on for Blender 2.8 that can save you an incredible amount of time with material imports. Meet the Lily Surface Scrapper from developer Elie Michel. Here is the download link.

The purpose of this Add-on is simple but extremely useful. You can get the URL from online sources like CC0Textures and paste it in the “Import Surface” section of the Add-on. It will go to the site and copy the texture files and create a new material in Blender with all the required Nodes.

After you paste the URL of a PBR material or HDR map in the importer, you will even be able to choose whether you want maps in 2K, 4K, or any other resolution available. To use this Add-on you have to save your Blender file first, because the script will keep all textures in the same folder of your project file.

Having the script creating all the Nodes for each texture will save you an insane amount of time. A few limitations of the Add-on:

• It won't handle Ambient Occlusion maps
• The materials don't feature Nodes for Mapping control

Once you install the Add-on, you will see the options at the Materials tab and World options to import HDR maps from HDRI Raven.

If you need some textures to start, we published an updated list with dozens of free PBR materials for architecture. Copy and paste the URL of a material in the Add-on dialog to see the “magic.”

Using Blender for architecture

Do you want to use Blender for architecture or render your projects using Cycles or Eevee? We have three books available that could help you!

They cover the use of Blender for producing architectural content and also all information you need to render projects in real-time:

• Blender 2.9 for architecture: Modeling and rendering with Eevee and Cycles
• Blender 2.8 parametric modeling: Drivers, Custom Properties, and Shape Keys for 3D modeling
• Blender 3.0: The beginner's guide
• Blender 2.8 for technical drawing
• Blender Eevee: The guide to real-time rendering with Blender 2.8

You can get them in both digital and paperback formats. By ordering those books, you will not only improve your skills with Blender for architecture but also support Blender 3D Architect.