Exploring Material Maker | Weekly Update #34

Hello and welcome to another entry of ‘Free Software Alternatives for broke Indie Devs’.
Previously, we looked at Quixel Mixer to help you texture specific models, and today we are taking a look at something similar but even more flexible, Material Maker.

Material Maker is a free and open-source application to create procedural textures that was built based on the graph setup in Godot Engine; however, you do not need Godot to run this program.
I think the the closest industry-standard program to compare it to would probably be Substance.

Like Substance, Material Maker utilizes a node-based system. You can connect nodes that perform mathematical operations, add noise, patterns, and other effects to create textures.

Unlike with Quixel Mixer, where you tend to texture one model at a time and export the textures for that specific model (although you could also create tileable textures with a little bit of extra work, of course), the focus for Material Maker is to procedurally create tileable textures that can be applied to any mesh, providing artists and developers with a flexible and efficient workflow.

This makes Material Maker an incredibly powerful tool. While other software nowadays is going more and more in the direction of procedurally texturing your models (e.g., Blender), there is something very nice about software whose sole focus is just that.

Material Maker also offers options to directly export into Unreal and even setting up the materials for you if you allow execution of their Python scripts within the engine.

One thing to consider is also since Material Maker is utilizing a very similar node approach to Substance, skills and tutorials should be applicable across program boundaries. So, while it is not the fastest or most feature complete software out there, it still makes it an easy and free first introduction to procedural texturing – before spending hundreds on professional tools like Substance or similar.

By the way, did you know you can one-time buy some of Adobe's products - like Substance - on Steam? You only get new updates for a year, but it is significantly cheaper than keep paying them each month 😉💰

And that’s it for this week ☺️Have a great week out there, you lovely internet stranger, and see you next time 👋🌈