Principled BSDF
Blender's all-purpose PBR shader
Also known as: Blender Principled shader · Principled BSDF Blender · Blender PBR material · Blender base color metallic roughness
Definition
The Principled BSDF is Blender's main physically based shader, combining base color, metallic, roughness, IOR, transmission, emission, alpha and coating into one node. It follows the metal/roughness PBR workflow, so textures from Substance Painter or engine pipelines plug in directly: base color, metallic, roughness and a normal map through a Normal Map node. It works in both Eevee and Cycles and is exported to glTF.
In production
Plug color maps as sRGB and data maps such as roughness, metallic and normal as Non-Color, which is the most common setup mistake in Blender. Roughness and metallic are separate inputs, so a packed ORM texture needs a Separate Color node to split it. Keep materials simple for game assets, since only the textures and slot names travel to the engine.
