It puts Tachyon's Texture Tools inside Blender, in a workspace tab of their own called Texture Tools, next to Layout and Modeling. There are three: the ORM Packer packs AO, Roughness and Metallic into one texture, the ORM Unpacker splits one back into maps, and Rename / Resize / Convert renames, resizes and re-encodes whole folders. Getting a set of maps ready for a material stops meaning a trip out of Blender.

They are greyscale maps, so each one only needs one channel. Packed as the R, G and B of one texture, a material goes from five textures (Base Color, AO, Roughness, Metallic, Normal) to three (Base Color, ORM, Normal): the shader reads all three values with one texture sample instead of three, and those maps take up to two thirds less memory, because a greyscale map is usually stored as a full RGB texture. It is also fewer files to import and keep in sync. ORM is the layout glTF and Unreal Engine read. Packing does not change the number of draw calls by itself — that comes from your meshes and materials — but it does cut texture lookups, bindings and memory for every material that uses it.

Yes. No price, no account, no licence key, no trial and nothing locked. It is GPL-2.0-or-later, from Tachyon Studio.

No, and no. Every tool runs on your own computer. The add-on serves the page to itself on 127.0.0.1 (localhost), which only your own machine can reach, and it turns away requests from other websites. The page makes no network requests of its own; the Join Discord button just opens a link in your browser.

The tools do; the tab does not. Inside Blender the page is shown by Microsoft Edge WebView2, which exists only on Windows. On macOS and Linux, Open Texture Tools opens the same page in your default web browser, still served by Blender, so every tool works there as long as Blender stays open. Saving straight into folders needs Chrome or Edge; other browsers download instead.

It is the part of Microsoft Edge that shows web pages inside other applications. It comes with Windows 11 and with most up-to-date Windows 10 installs. Without it, Open Texture Tools says the runtime is missing and opens your browser instead; if it is damaged, the tab can sit on Loading Texture Tools…. Either way, install the free Evergreen WebView2 Runtime from Microsoft and restart Blender.

No — the add-on is what serves the page, so Blender has to be running. Where the tab cannot run, the button opens the same page in your browser, and it works there for as long as Blender is open.

Only AO, Roughness, Metallic and Emissive maps — whether you use Select textures, drop a folder or run Batch. The map type is read from the end of the filename, where naming conventions put it, so Wood_Oak_Roughness goes into Roughness and Metal_Plate_BaseColor is recognised as a base colour, not a metallic map. Base colour, normal, height, alpha, opacity, masks and already-packed _ORM / _ARM / _RMA files are skipped and listed by name. An Emissive map (emissive, emission, emit, glow or _E) goes into the fourth, alpha, channel.

Drop it on its slot by hand in Single mode — a single file dropped on a slot goes in whatever it is called. Or rename it so it ends in its type (_AO, _Roughness, _Metallic, _Emissive) and the next scan will find it. The scan is strict on purpose: guessing would put, say, an opacity map into the alpha channel, and the packed texture would then look empty.

An Emissive map is packed into its alpha channel. Where the emission is black, alpha is 0, and image viewers hide pixels whose alpha is 0 — so you see only the glowing parts, or nothing at all. The AO, Roughness and Metallic data are intact in R, G and B; the R, G and B buttons under the packer's preview show each one. For a fully opaque file, leave the Emissive slot empty: alpha is then solid 255.

The one your engine or shader reads. ORM — R = AO, G = Roughness, B = Metallic — is the glTF and Unreal convention and the default; RMA, MRO and AMR are there for pipelines that expect them. On Auto, the Unpacker reads the order from the file's name: _ORM, _ARM, _RMA, _MRO or _AMR.

Load it in an Image Texture node with its colour space set to Non-Color, add a Separate Color node, and connect Green to Roughness and Blue to Metallic on the Principled BSDF. Red is the AO, which the Principled BSDF has no input for; it is there for the engines that read it.

Only through the options that say so. Rename the originals in place renames without changing a byte, skips any file whose new name already exists, and stops before writing anything if two files would end up with the same name. Save next to originals writes the new packed or unpacked files into the source folder, replacing a file of the same name there. Everything else is a download, and inside Blender every download asks where to save it.

It adds one workspace tab, Texture Tools, which is saved with the file like any other tab. It does not touch your objects, materials or images: the tools work on the files you drop or pick. To remove the tab, right-click it and choose Delete; if Texture Tools tab always in the top bar is ticked in the preferences, it is added again next time.

No. Each has its own tab, its own local port and its own History, so both can be enabled at the same time.

Yes. Texture Tools is in every area's Editor Type menu, next to Blender's own editors. For a second monitor, use View ▸ Area ▸ Duplicate Area into New Window, move that window over, and pick Texture Tools in it. The tool shows in one place at a time; any other Texture Tools area has Show Here in its header to bring it over, files and settings intact.

Yes: Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Tachyon Texture Tools ▸ Sidebar Tab offers Tachyon (the default), TTT and Tachyon Texture Tools, or Custom with any name you type. Naming another add-on's tab puts the button beside its panels.

Inside Blender, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\TachyonTextureTools\WebView2 — per Windows user and outside the add-on's own folder, so it survives Blender restarts, and updating or reinstalling the add-on never wipes it. The newest 60 sessions are kept. A web browser keeps its own, separate History for the page. Copies of the files each session loaded are kept in the staging folder, %LOCALAPPDATA%\TachyonTextureTools\Staging (or one you choose in the preferences), for the newest 10 sessions — that is how Restore and Continue your last session? bring the files back. To take a session to another computer, Save .txt it here and Load .txt it there; files and folders cannot travel that way, so pick them again after Restore.

As much as the files you load: a 1 GB texture folder is about 1 GB in the staging folder. Each file is stored once however many sessions use it, and only the newest 10 sessions keep their copies. In Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Tachyon Texture Tools ▸ Sessions you can keep fewer sessions, move the staging folder to another drive, switch the copies off, or Clear Staged Files; the preferences show how much is stored.

On the Tachyon Discord: https://discord.gg/T4CkhDghNP — the Join Discord button is in the tool's header, in the add-on preferences and in the welcome message. Include your Blender and Windows versions, and what Blender's status bar said.