Material Maker | Procedural Textures

Archive notice: This article was originally published on 25 November 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

While Adobe draws the Substance tools further into the subscription spiral, several alternatives are getting ready. Material Maker is a free procedural material-creation tool based on the Godot Engine. As in Substance Designer, materials can be defined with the help of various nodes. Developer Rodolphe Suescun released a new update a few ago.

Material Maker Structure and Nodes

The interface is divided into three areas: Node Library, Preview window and Node Graph. Using the different nodes, you can generate, transform or combine seamless textures according to a simple input-and-output principle to create a material. A material currently consists of metallic/roughness PBR maps. Just over 25 nodes are now available for editing in the following three types:

• Generator Nodes for creating basic patterns
• Transform Nodes for changing shape and colour for more complex textures
• Combine Nodes for combining multiple inputs

As in Substance Designer, many nodes in Material Maker are “resolution-independent”. Accordingly, you can work with transformations without affecting the resolution. Export is currently available at up to 4096 x 4096 px in PNG format for the individual texture maps: Albedo, Metallic, Roughness, Emission, Normal, AO and Depth Map. (Before the textures can be exported, you must have saved the material through the “File” menu). You can find details about operating the tool here in the manual.

Material Maker 0.7 Release

The next release of the texture generator has been online for a few hours. Alongside several interface changes, version 0.7 adds a good number of new nodes. These include Grescale Uniform, Color Noise, Color Perlin Noise, Scratches Pattern, Signed distance functions geometry, Invert, Brightness/Contrast, Quantize, Ambient occlusion, Circle Map and more. You can find all details in the release notes.

Availability

Material Maker 0.7 is currently available for free for Windows & Linux here under an MIT licence. The tool works either as a standalone application or as an add-on for Godot.

Further information: Material Maker website