Get free procedural texture generator Material Maker

[Carlosan]

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An early demo of Material Maker, developer Rod Zilla’s open-source procedural PBR texture map generator. The latest 0.6 update makes it possible to customise the software’s generator nodes via GLSL code.

 
Tools developer Rod Zilla – whose name we strongly suspect to be a pseudonym – has released Material Maker 0.6, the latest update to his interesting free procedural texture generator.

The software, which is based on the Godot game engine, provides an open-source counterpart to Substance Designer, enabling artists to author complex procedural textures via a node-based workflow.

The 0.6 update makes it possible to customise most of Material Maker’s generator nodes via GLSL code, and makes it possible to group sub-sections of the node graph into individual nodes.

A simple but capable free alternative to Substance Designer
First released last year, Material Maker is described as a “simple procedural texture generation tool based on the Godot Engine” – the software is available both as a standalone app, and an add-on for Godot itself.

Its workflow is reminiscent of a simplified version of Substance Designer, Adobe’s games-industry-standard material authoring tool, enabling artists to create procedural textures via visual programming.

Users drag nodes from a library panel to the graph editor and wire their inputs and outputs together, with the resulting generated texture being previewed in real time on a 3D mesh.

Nodes are divided into similar categories to Substance Designer, including Generator nodes for creating base patterns, and Filter nodes, for modifying the base pattern into a usable texture.

 

 
Material Maker’s tool set is still fairly small: in the current release, there are around 20 nodes, compared to the hundreds available in Substance Designer.

However, it is still possible to create quite complex textures: the image above shows a fully procedural mandala-like form that could be used as decorative moulding in an interior scene.

Completed materials can be exported as a set of metallic/roughness PBR texture maps in PNG format.