Material Maker Documentation

Material Maker is a PBR (Physically Based Rendering) procedural material editor and texture painting tool built on the Godot Engine. It offers two primary workflows:

1. Procedural Material Authoring: Create textures by interconnecting nodes in a graph to generate, transform, filter, or combine inputs.
2. Texture Painting: Define brushes using the same node system to paint directly onto 3D models.

Supported PBR channels include:

• Albedo
• Metallic
• Roughness
• Emission
• Normal map
• Depth map

GodotSteam for GDExtension is an ecosystem of tools designed to integrate Valve's Steamworks SDK with the Godot Engine. It supports Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms and is available as a GDExtension for Godot 3.x and 4.x.

Important Compatibility Note: Do not use the GDExtension version of GodotSteam with any module versions (pre-compiled or custom-compiled). They are not compatible.

In Material Maker, most nodes are shader nodes. Their outputs are not images, but shader programs that calculate values based on coordinates. The available output types are:

• Grayscale, Color, and RGBA: Calculates the color of a pixel from its coordinates.
• SDF2D: Calculates the signed distance of a 2D point from its coordinates.
• SDF3D: Calculates the signed distance of a 3D point from its coordinates.

Because nodes are combined as shader programs, most shader nodes are resolution independent.

The Layers panel provides a tree view of all layers in a painting project. Layers are applied from bottom to top to combine into the final material. There are three distinct layer types:

• Paint layers: Layers containing Albedo, Metallic, Roughness, Emission, and Depth information that are manually painted using tools in the Paint panel.
• Procedural layers: Layers containing Albedo, Metallic, Roughness, Emission, and Depth information that are applied automatically to the entire layer via a corresponding brush (configured in the Paint panel).
• Mask layers: Layers containing a single grayscale channel that acts as an alpha mask for the entire hierarchy of its parent layer. Multiple masks are multiplied together to create a single combined alpha channel.

When working on a Painting project, the following panels are available:

• Library (Top Left): A tree view containing all available nodes for material and brush creation.
• Reference (Side): Used to display images, generated textures, and to pick colors or gradients.
• Brush (Side): Contains all predefined brushes available for painting on the model.
• Parameters (Side): Used to modify the parameters of the currently active brush.
• Layers (Side): Used to create, remove, and modify painting layers.

Material nodes are specialized shader nodes used to define the final output of a material graph. Unlike standard shader nodes, their outputs cannot be connected to other nodes in the graph; instead, they are used to generate image files and define export targets.

Key characteristics:

• There can be only one material node in a material graph.
• They define the preview shader used in the Preview Panel and for the website.
• They define the export targets for the material.

Operations:

• Modify Type: Use the context menu to change the material type or copy/paste custom material nodes.
• Edit Node: Use the keyboard shortcut Control+W to make a node editable. This opens the Material Editor window.
• Preview: The Material Editor includes a Preview tab where you can define a shader for 3D previews using the Godot Shading Language.

When working on a Material project, the following panels are available:

• Library (Top Left): A tree view containing all available nodes for material and brush creation.
• Reference (Side): Used to display images, generated textures, and to pick colors or gradients.
• Hierarchy (Right): Displays the hierarchy of node groups within the current material graph.
• 2D preview (Bottom Left): Shows the first texture generated by the currently selected node.
• 3D preview (Bottom Left): Shows the current material applied to a sample mesh in a sample environment.
• Histogram (Side): Displays the tones histogram of the texture generated by the currently selected node.

The Material node is the central node of a Material Maker project.

• Uniqueness: There is exactly one Material node per project. It is created automatically with every new project and cannot be deleted or duplicated.
• Copy/Paste: If you copy and paste nodes, the Material node itself will not be pasted, but existing connections to it will be preserved where possible.
• Godot Integration: When using Material Maker as a Godot addon, a SpatialMaterial is automatically generated from this node.

Material Maker supports two primary project types, each with a distinct interface and workflow:

• Material projects: Used to create PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials by connecting nodes in a graph editor.
• Painting projects: Used to paint directly onto a 3D model. The interface includes a 3D view for painting and a graph editor for describing brushes.