albedotexture

An albedo texture, also called a base color map, is a two-dimensional image that encodes the intrinsic color of a surface. It represents the surface color at each pixel independently of lighting, shading, or shadows. In modern rendering, particularly physically based rendering (PBR), the albedo map provides the base color that combines with lighting through the shading model and material properties. It is usually stored as an RGB image and may include an alpha channel to encode transparency or opacity for cutouts. Albedo data is typically stored in sRGB color space on disk and converted to linear space by the shader unless the pipeline specifies otherwise.

Albedo textures are used alongside other material maps such as normal or bump maps, roughness or gloss maps, metalness maps, and ambient occlusion maps. In PBR workflows, the metalness map determines whether a pixel behaves like a metal, which affects how the albedo color is interpreted during shading. The roughness map controls surface microfacet roughness, influencing reflections, while ambient occlusion modulates global lighting.

Best practice is to ensure the albedo contains only color information, avoiding baked lighting, shadows, or highlights. For painted or weathered surfaces, detail is added via additional textures or texture channels rather than by embedding shading into the albedo. Common formats include PNG, TIFF, or EXR, with 8- or higher-bit depth depending on quality needs.