The excellent Godot powered free and open-source procedural texture generation application Material Maker just released Material Maker 1.6. Material Maker is about as close as you can get to a free version of Adobe’s popular Substance Designer application. The 1.6 release is jam packed with great new features:
Controlled Variations: This feature allows users to modify four custom variables to affect almost any node parameter, rather than just randomizing the seed. It introduces new nodes like Iterate Variations and Layer Variations to easily generate, combine, or stack multiple subgraph variations without needing to duplicate nodes.
Aperture Nodes: New Aperture nodes have been implemented into the graph ecosystem. These nodes can be used to create named, wireless connections between nodes to help keep your workspace clean.
Graph View Improvements: Organizing and interacting with graphs is much smoother with new diagonal “circuit” style connections, node grabbing via the “G” key, and edge scrolling when dragging connections. The graph also introduces drag-and-drop support for image parameters and port previews for group input nodes.
New Nodes and Exporters: A basic glTF exporter has been added to easily export static PBR materials, alongside a new variadic Color Pick node. Additionally, the FBM noise node has been upgraded to include support for lacunarity and gabor noise.
General Interface Enhancements: The overall user interface received several quality-of-life tweaks, including vertical tabs in the Preferences dialog, project tab rearrangement, and consistent SVG icons. Furthermore, file dialogs will now conveniently default to the user’s home directory.
Key Links
Material Maker 1.6 Release Details
Material Maker on Steam (Coming Soon)
You can learn more about Material Maker and the Material Maker 1.6 release specifically in the video below.