Material Maker

Game development that involves the use of map environments that come with custom textures, patterns, and materials, can require specialized software. Material Maker is one such application, which was designed specifically in order to provide users with the means to be able to describe procedural textures, through connections and nodes.

Based on the Godot Engine, this authoring tool defines the materials as graphs which are determined by node transformation for textures. Being defined by GLSL shaders, upon connecting the nodes, the application will generate combined shaders, as opposed to generating individual images for each node.

Users will also be able to create new nodes by grouping or combining existing ones, or by writing their own, custom GLSL shaders. The node generation process will be stopped when reaching a particular buffer node or the node of the defined, target material.

The application comes deployed with a built-in library that contains roughly 150 nodes, for defining shapes, patterns, filters or transformations for both 2D and 3D shapes. The latter are being described as signed distance functions and there’s two ways that users can access this library: either through the context menu of the graph view or, through the dedicated, library panel.