Material Maker is a powerful open source Substance Designer like application we’ve covered for a very long time that just hit a major milestone, the release of version 1.0! Built on top of the Open Source game engine, Material Maker evolved rapidly over the last 4 years, such as the addition of painting tools in release 0.95. Along the way it even won a well deserved Epic MegaGrant.
In terms of the 1.0 release, new features include:
Miscellaneous
- The MacOS port is now signed and notarized, so you should be able to run Material maker right away, and should no longer have messages from Gatekeeper stating it is damaged (please be aware I’m new to MacOS development and don’t hesitate to report any problem).
- Material Maker is now based on Godot 3.4.4.
Nodes
- The EasySDF node has been extended with 3D primitives, operators and transforms, and can now be used to create complex raymarched shapes. Depending on its contents, the EasySDF node will therefore output a 2D SDF or a 3D SDF.
This is just a second step for this node and more features will be added in future releases.
- A new Seven Segment Display node has been added (contributed by williamchange) with many parameters to tune the output.
- The new Smooth Mix Workflownode can be used to mix-by-height its inputs with smooth transition between materials
- The Dilate node has been updated to improve precision in higher resolutions (contributed by Arnklit and wojtekpil)
- The new Morphology node provides dilation and erosion operations on mask
- Three new noise nodes have been added: White Noise, Clouds Noise and Directional Noise (contributed by Arnklit)
- A new Make Tileable Square node has been added and is a nicer alternative to Make Tileable (contributed by Arnklit)
- The new Slope node, generates slopes from the highest areas of an input heightmap
- The AlterHSV node can be used to modify the Hue, Saturation and Value of its input using input maps, and is a very easy way of adding nice variations to Albedo channels.
- A new node has been added to create Mesh patterns (contributed by Arnklit)
- The Normal Map node has been updated to improve precision when the buffer option is used
- New Additive and AddSub modes have been added to the Blend node (contributed by Arnklit)
- A flip parameter has been added to the Mirror node to mirror the left or top ,part of the input instead of the default right or bottom
- New packing/unpacking nodes that can store 1 (or 2) values into 2 (or 4) when using buffers for better precision (contributed by Arnklit and wojtekpil)
General
- An option has been added to automatically size new comment nodes to current selection (contributed by Zhibade).
- In the Reference panel, it is now possible to scan an average color by dragging the mouse cursor around.
- When creating a new painting project, Material Maker will check that the model can be painted (i.e. it has a single surface and texture coordinates)
- The configuration of 2D preview (view type and guides) and graph editor (grid) panels is now saved.
- Gestures (panning and zooming using 2 fingers on a touchpad) are now supported in 2D and 3D preview as well as painting panels.
- A new button has been added to the Preferences dialog to download translations. Japanese (contributed by mekogma) and Chinese (by free_king) are currently available.
- Pasting a list of HTML colors (in hex format) into the graph editor now creates a new Colorize node that can be used to create gradients or as a colormap (contributed by Jesse Dubay).
Key Links
Material Maker 1.0 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Additionally it is an open source project (link above) released on GitHub under the MIT open source license. You can learn more about Material Maker 1.0 in the video below.