Material Maker, a free and open-source texture creation tool that can act as an alternative to Substance Designer, has received a new update roughly three months after its previous release.
The new version focuses on a range of user interface improvements, introduces additional nodes, and addresses remaining issues related to the recent transition from Godot 3 to Godot 4. Material Maker is powered by the Godot game engine, and this engine upgrade represented a significant change introduced in the previous update.
Several improvements have been made to the node-based Graph editor, which now includes, among other features, lasso selection for nodes, a simple way to cut or reroute existing connections using a combination of mouse input and shortcuts, as well as new tools to align nodes within the graph.
A number of existing nodes have been updated, and several new nodes have also been introduced. Newly added nodes include Directional Warp, Inverse Circle Map, Symmetric Nearest Neighbor filter, and Mesh Triplanar. Some previously missing SDF nodes have also been added, such as Ellipse, Tunnel, Stairs, Pyramid, Ellipsoid, Octahedron, along with a new Kite node.
Other improvements include support for loading DDS images and FBX meshes. FBX support is particularly useful when working with this format to load 3D models and use them for previewing materials.
The new version also brings an updated color picker that now remembers the previously selected color mode and picker shape, reintroduces the ability to export and batch export materials from the command line, and includes several additional quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes.
It has been stated that Material Maker is planned to launch on Steam later this year. Users interested in supporting the project can already add Material Maker to their Steam wishlist, which can help increase its visibility ahead of release.
For more information, visit the Material Maker website.
