Material Maker

What is Material Maker?

Material Maker is a procedural texture generator built around a node graph, in the same spirit as Substance Designer but completely free and open source. You drag nodes onto a canvas, connect them, and the graph produces seamless PBR textures that never repeat visibly.

It was created by Rodolphe Zitourne, the developer behind the pixel art tool Pixelorama, and first appeared in 2019. Since then it has grown a loyal community that shares node graphs and textures, making it easy to learn from other people's work.

Because everything is procedural, your textures are infinitely scalable and infinitely tweakable: change one value and the whole material updates. That makes it a favorite for artists who want unique, resolution-independent materials without paying for a subscription.

Key Features

• Node-based graph editor with hundreds of nodes
• Generates seamless, tileable PBR textures procedurally
• Outputs albedo, normal, roughness, height and AO maps
• Built-in library of shapes, patterns and generators
• Community sharing of node graphs and materials
• Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and in the browser
• Export presets for Unity, Unreal and Blender

How to get started

Download Material Maker from the official website for your platform, or try the browser version without installing anything. When it opens you get a canvas and a node list on the side.

A good first project: add a pattern node, connect it to a colorize node, then to the material output. Press play and you have a texture. From there, explore the community gallery, copy an example graph and dissect how it works.

• Download Material Maker or open the web version
• Add a pattern node to the canvas
• Connect it through color and distortion nodes
• Preview the seamless material in the viewport
• Export the PBR maps for your engine

Use cases

• Creating unique procedural textures for indie games
• Learning how procedural materials work by building graphs
• Generating tileable ground, wall and sci-fi panel materials
• Building texture sets that need to scale to any resolution
• Sharing and remixing community node graphs

Pricing and licensing

Material Maker is completely free and open source. There are no paid tiers, no subscriptions and no asset paywalls, and you can use the materials you create in commercial projects.

The open-source license means the project survives on community contributions. If you want to support it, the official website and GitHub repository point to donation options.

Pros and cons

The strengths are freedom and flexibility. A node graph gives you total control over the texture, seamless output is built in, and the price of zero makes it the obvious choice for hobbyists and small teams. The community gallery is a fantastic learning resource.

The trade-offs are the learning curve and the ecosystem. Node-based thinking takes time to click, there is no equivalent of Substance's massive commercial asset library, and development pace is slower than a company-backed product.

Alternatives

• Substance 3D Designer: Adobe's commercial node-based material editor
• ArmorLab: open source AI-assisted PBR texture authoring
• Materialize: free tool that builds full PBR map sets from one image
• Poly: generates seamless PBR texture sets from a text prompt