Material Maker: Node-Based Material Creator

[Gin]

Some people here might already know this, but there is a free node-based material creation program made in the Godot engine. If you're familiar with Substance Designer then you probably would understand how useful this is. I've been using it in my own projects lately and I figured it might be a good idea to post about it here since I didn't find any threads mentioning it.

https://www.materialmaker.org/

The website also features a user-created library that includes CC0 materials people have made. A lot of them are mostly tech demo materials, but even ones that aren't general use can be downloaded and examined to see how they were made in the program, which helps with learning it. There's also a lot of tutorials for Substance Designer itself online and, though it doesn't line up 1:1, it seems like you can generally get most of the same stuff done in Material Maker using different methods.

[datiswous]

I posted about it here:

I also tried texturelab which is a little simpler.

[Gin]

Ah, it didn't come up in the search I did, sorry about that.

Edit: I just tried Texturelab. It's more polished looking, closer to Substance Designer visually, and connecting nodes is less finicky at different zoom levels, but it has much fewer nodes than Material Maker. It's hard to say it's currently usable since it's also lacking some key nodes like curvature and occlusion, but it would be nice to see it get better eventually.

Edited June 20, 2022 by Gin
Tried texturelab

[datiswous]

If I remember correctly I found it in texturelab easier if I wanted to use an existing texture to add normal and specular onto, although I still find it dificult to get the right look.

[Gin]

That makes sense, these programs are more for making textures from the ground up than generating normal maps from existing images. Though, there is someone working with Material Maker who has been using it to create normal maps from photos, but they seem to be doing the studio method to get exact normal maps from the images.

[Gin]

Material Maker would probably be best used as a way to create textures that you cannot find already made, or for textures that you want to be easily modifiable in a nondestructive way.

For example, this material of sewn flesh I made would probably be hard to find a CC0 material of otherwise, and if you don't like stuff like the size of the threads or patches it's easily changeable through editing node parameters: https://www.materialmaker.org/material?id=453

It wouldn't be efficient to use it as a replacement for materials that you can already find as CC0, though, since it takes time to make these.