🧵 Material Maker
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 18:05:17 UTC No. 997322
Holy shit I love this program! Sure it sucks, but it's amazing! I thought it's like 1/10 of Substance Designer but in reality it's more like it's 7/10 of Substance Designer + dozen of features and workflows SD doesn't have + ability to implement new and customize any existing nodes directly using shader code. Even though its UI has some slightly stupid feel to it and nowhere as smooth as SD, it's just conceptually way better because of its open-endedness with shader code and additional features, so I only consider it the right decision to switch to Material Maker and maybe even try to support it anyhow, either by donating or sharing nodes or whatever. I also expected this UI clumsiness to make it way slower to use than SD but in reality, because unlike SD it has all node properties directly on node itself (and not hidden in a pane that is only showed when you select the node), it's kinda compensated and in general its' quite fast to use. It sucks ofc that sometimes undo/redo does work and sometimes not, and some curves are weirdly saved if you choose to click somewhere inaapropriate instead of ok/cancel, but honestly this is all minor stuff. It really works, and enables nice new workflows and is quite productive. I really enjoy all those features, like export nodes for example because I can autoexport a whole set of textures based on some core texture.
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 21:04:01 UTC No. 997333
>>997322
We don’t do this in Substance, Photoshop, Autodesk or on Blender. It’s a scam, you got scam.
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 21:04:25 UTC No. 997334
>>997322
In previous versions it didn't even have flood fill and corresponding nodes. Now it has that and even more related nodes than SD (like flood fill to UV stuff).
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 22:17:40 UTC No. 997338
>>997335
You will use ancient tools and methods.
https://cgobsession.com/what-is-a-n
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 22:34:57 UTC No. 997340
>>997338
I don't understand what you are trying to say. There are many ways to do procedural normal maps.
In my current project I only use diffuse, so I only care about actual texture, so my primary concerns are composing/breaking/variating shape patterns,
warping/bluring them, making scratches/edge highlights etc, combining different kinds of noises together, and then coloring all those kinds of grayscales together.
Anonymous at Fri, 4 Oct 2024 22:46:50 UTC No. 997341
> ancient tools and methods
I'm personally doing retro look, but this is all full featured PBR tools. With old stuff doing repetitive texture patterns is possible even manually just takes more time than needed for stuff like bricks/stone/etc, with PBR stuff where you have like 5+ maps for every material, I bet 99% of what you see in professional works like AAA games etc, is done in procedural software like SD.
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 00:41:05 UTC No. 997355
>>997322
>+ ability to implement new and customize any existing nodes directly using shader code
This really is by far the coolest feature Material Maker has. If you know how to write shader code you can do absolutely anthing. In theory you could even use MM to prototype a render pipeline by throwing in raw buffer images and seeing what you could get out of them.
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 02:29:38 UTC No. 997368
>>997355
Or you could have just learned how programming languages works. What you did is the exact process of Blender cult claiming something is better but locked into the ecosystem.
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 03:29:39 UTC No. 997373
>>997333
> It’s a scam, you got scam.
It's a free program...
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 08:26:27 UTC No. 997382
>>997368
> Or you could have just learned how programming languages works
Those nodes are high level visual programming languages. Shaders are low level text programming languages... What are you trying to say?
> What you did is the exact process of Blender cult claiming something is better but locked into the ecosystem.
That is a correct argument.
By the way I don't think you can actually implement new nodes in Blender? I mean on shader level.
If that was possible people would already came up with all kinds of flood fills, directional warps, slope blurs and whatever else substance designer and material maker are used for.
And honestly, it would be convenient to have this directly in Blender, because you could make changes and see new results on your geometry faster, without switching between programs and doing re-export.
But also, you need to be able to see intermediate results which is something I'm not sure Blender nodes can do.
Anonymous at Sat, 5 Oct 2024 23:15:51 UTC No. 997426
>>997322
This is made in Godot, by the way, so everything here can be used directly in a Godot project natively.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 00:04:28 UTC No. 997430
>>997382
it's GLSL bro, there's no locked ecosystem.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 07:31:54 UTC No. 997458
>>997368
This is a dumb take. The nodes generate written shader code, literally nothing is locked.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 08:30:21 UTC No. 997459
>>997430
>>997458
Yeah, he's claiming that open-endedness of MM is the same argument as open-endedness of Blender compared to "industry" software like Maya or 3dmax, which he implies is a bad argument, which I think is actually a good argument.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 08:39:48 UTC No. 997461
>>997460
Just because it's made in Godot doesn't make Godot exported materials more first class than any other exported materials though. It's more like a game made in Godot type of application rather than Godot plugin or whatever.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 12:13:41 UTC No. 997482
>>997461
It is more first class because you don't necessarily have to export those materials in the same way. You can literally use the procedural materials inside a godot project. You couldn't use those for Unity or Unreal.
Obviously your usecase matters, it's resource intensive so it's not like that's a common need but saying it's just like the others is misleading. It IS first class for godot.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 14:58:36 UTC No. 997498
>>997482
> You can literally use the procedural materials inside a godot project.
Can you provide a screenshot of what you mean? As far as I know, Blender has Shader Nodes, Unity has ShaderGraph, and Unreal Engine has something similar via Blueprints, so they all have first class support of procedural materials. Godot on the other hand, doesn't have anything like this at all, they can only use shaders directly for procedural materials. But, this is all irrelevant since Material Maker for any export target will simply render everything into PNGs and arrange the most basic bitch material setup using that PNGs for selected export target. Do you mean you can export shader directly? Well, in that case you can use that shader wherever you want, be it Godot, Unity, UE or something else.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:44:30 UTC No. 997502
>>997498
You can export everything built with material maker as shader code and just use that in Godot. You do not have to use the baked export (which will leave you will multiple layers of image files). Material Maker is using Godot so anything it can do, Godot can do, and you can just use the shader code it generates based on your project inside a Godot project.
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:46:19 UTC No. 997503
>>997498
And no, you can't just use that shader where ever you want, it's using Godot's shader language, Unity isn't compatible and Unreal isn't compatible.
It's the same way that you can't just copy and paste shader from Unity to Unreal, it needs to be built using the system for that engine.
You could copy the output and recreate it using those system, but you'd actually need to go and do that, its not a one and done
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:49:47 UTC No. 997504
>>997503
I need to correct myself, Unity and Unreal both you HLSL, I meant from blender to either, it uses OSL
Godot uses its own
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:52:34 UTC No. 997505
>>997498
Material maker can export a .tres and plug it as a material directly into godot not sure what the other guy means by copying shader code no idea why you'd want to do that anyways
Anonymous at Sun, 6 Oct 2024 21:12:41 UTC No. 997526
>>997503
Oh, I forgot everybody's not using GLSL, so you're correct.
I'm not sure how to export shader code from Material Maker into Godot though, I couldn't find such an option.
>>997505
It's baked export right? It will simply generate PNGs and combine them into material, so it's not going to be procedural on Godot side.
Anonymous at Mon, 7 Oct 2024 17:42:40 UTC No. 997621
>>997368
I'm a graphics programmer you retard, you have no idea how valuable a tool is where you don't have to set up a pipeline just to test something
Anonymous at Tue, 8 Oct 2024 23:27:57 UTC No. 997787
>>997322
try ucupaint next, its substance painter for blender
Anonymous at Wed, 9 Oct 2024 19:46:35 UTC No. 997869
>>997787
Seconding this, base Blender sucks ass for any type of painting, but the addons make it the best of the best for it actually. I regret not starting here.
Anonymous at Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:22:18 UTC No. 998545
Sounds pretty cool!