# MaterialMaps **Make your textures look bumpy instead of flat. No shader pack required.** Client-side · Sodium-dependent

--- In Minecraft, every block face is a perfectly flat square. Stone, bricks, gravel, the texture *looks* rough, but the surface itself is smooth, so light hits all of it exactly the same way. That is why blocks can look like stickers. MaterialMaps fixes that.
Many HD resource packs already include an extra hidden image for each texture that says "this pixel sticks out, that one is a dent".
Normally only a shader pack can read those.
**MaterialMaps reads them itself**, so every bump catches the light from the right side and casts its own little shadow. Stone looks carved. Bricks look stacked. Gravel looks like actual gravel. - **No shader pack needed**, no Iris, no OptiFine, no giant FPS hit - **Still looks like vanilla**, no bloom, no color changes, no fancy skies. Just depth - **Works with the packs you already have**, if your pack supports it, turn the mod on and you're done #### Do I need a special resource pack? Yes, MaterialMaps only adds detail where the pack provides it. HD packs like [Prime's HD Textures](https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/primes-hd-textures) do.
With a plain vanilla pack, nothing will change. > ### Still in heavy development ! > MaterialMaps works, but it is young. Compatibility with large rendering mods is not guaranteed yet.
> [Bug reports](https://github.com/RX0kas/MaterialMaps/issues) are very welcome. ## Comparison Screenshots taken with [Prime's HD Textures](https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/primes-hd-textures) ![Picture of the same world with and without the mod](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RX0kas/MaterialMaps/refs/heads/master/comparaison.png) ## Features - **Block normal maps**: applied directly to terrain through a dedicated rendering path, so vanilla chunk geometry is left untouched. - **Item normal maps**: held, dropped, and inventory items get the same treatment. - **Height maps**: when a texture has an `_h.png` but no `_n.png`, MaterialMaps derives a tangent-space normal map in memory during resource reload. - **LabPBR 1.3 support**: paired `_n.png` and `_s.png` maps are recognised; normal X/Y and ambient occlusion are read from the LabPBR normal map, and its alpha channel is preserved as embedded height data. - **Dimension-aware lighting**: sun and moon direction follow the dimension you are in. - **Experimental parallax**: bounded height sampling on nearby solid and cutout faces, with optional recess-edge shading and voxel-like texel relief. - **Vanilla fallback**: anything MaterialMaps cannot render safely is handed straight back to vanilla, with the reason recorded. ## Compatibility | Mod | Status | |----------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | **Sodium** | Required | | **Iris** | Optional. When an Iris shader pack is active, MaterialMaps disables itself to avoid conflicts. | | **Fabric API** | Required | MaterialMaps is **client-side only**, you can join any server with it. ## Configuration Open the settings from ModMenu, or from *Video Settings -> MaterialMaps* when Sodium is installed. **Rendering** : toggle block and item normal maps, height-map derivation, and the vanilla fallback. **Lighting** : `Normal Strength` controls how strongly normal maps perturb the surface, `Ambient Strength` sets the minimum detail lighting, and `Directional Strength` sets the directional contrast. **Experimental** : parallax, parallax depth scale, recess edges, and voxel-like texel relief. **Debug** : normal-map, world-normal, and lighting debug views for blocks and items, plus render statistics. ### Commands For diagnosing a pack in-game: ```text /materialmaps summary [blocks|items] overview of what was detected /materialmaps inspect show the maps found for one texture, block, or item /materialmaps validate list resource-pack warnings and errors /materialmaps renderstats rendering diagnostics /materialmaps dump write the full material index to a file /materialmaps reload rebuild the index and normal atlases ``` ## For pack creators ### Naming convention Place your maps next to the base texture, using the `_n` and `_h` suffixes: ```text assets/minecraft/textures/block/stone.png assets/minecraft/textures/block/stone_n.png assets/minecraft/textures/block/stone_h.png assets/minecraft/textures/item/iron_pickaxe.png assets/minecraft/textures/item/iron_pickaxe_n.png ``` Rules worth knowing: - Explicit normal maps always take priority over height maps. - Height maps are only used to derive normals when `Height Maps` is enabled and no `_n.png` exists. - A map must match its base texture's dimensions, or it is skipped. - LabPBR packs can supply `_n.png` + `_s.png` pairs. - Only `textures/block` and `textures/item` are scanned. Run `/materialmaps validate` to catch orphan maps and dimension mismatches while you work, and enable **Strict Validation** in the settings to treat more problems as hard errors. ### Parallax notes The experimental parallax option applies bounded height sampling to nearby solid and cutout block faces. It fades out between 24 and 32 blocks and stays disabled for translucent layers. Cutout blocks keep their original alpha-tested silhouette. This is a lightweight prototype — there is no true geometry or silhouette displacement. ### Test pack A small development resource pack is included in the repository as `materialmaps-test-pack`. Run the client, enable it in the resource-pack screen, then inspect a diamond, an iron ingot, or a stick to see the item path at work. ## Requirements - Minecraft **26.2** - Fabric Loader **0.19.3+** - Fabric API ## AI Usage Not every line of code from this project is 100% human
AI has been used as a research tool and for programming assistance

RXokas