The Major Update to Material Maker Has Been Released

Software developer Rod Zilla has released Material Maker 1.0, a major update to the free procedural physically-based rendering materials authoring tool which enables artists to create procedural textures via visual programming.

The update to the software, which is often considered an open-source alternative to Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter, includes a number of bug fixes, as well as some new features and new nodes.

Among others, the update adds 10 new nodes including a Mesh node for generating mesh patterns, a Seven Segment Display node which has a number of parameters to tune the output, and a Smooth Mix Workflow node which can be used to mix-by-height its inputs with smooth transition between materials.

The update also brings three new noise nodes (White Noise, Clouds Noise, and Directional Noise), a new Morphology node that provides dilation and erosion operations on a mask, and extends the existing Dilate, Blend, Mirror, and Normal Map nodes.

Among the new features are a new option that allows automatically size new comment nodes to the current selection, the ability to scan an average color by dragging the mouse cursor around in the Reference panel, support of gestures (panning and zooming using 2 fingers on a touchpad) in 2D/3D preview and painting panels, and more.

Additionally, the new macOS edition has become a signed and notarized app, so users now should be able to run Material Maker right away without having messages from Gatekeeper stating that the app is damaged.

Material Maker 1.0 is available free for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The source code is available on GitHub under an open-source MIT license. You can learn more about new nodes and features Material Maker 1.0 adds here.