Free tool: MaterialVault for Unreal Engine

Technical artist Scott Rafferty has released MaterialVault, an open-source material library interface for Unreal Engine.

The plugin provides artists, particularly those using Unreal Engine as a real-time renderer for visualization or VFX projects, with a consolidated UI for browsing, editing and applying materials.

Browse, edit and apply materials from a single unified interface inside Unreal Engine
MaterialVault is intended to streamline materials workflow in Unreal Engine, consolidating Unreal’s native tools for viewing, editing and applying materials into a single interface.

Rafferty, who has previously worked in automotive visualization and for VFX facilities like MPC, compares it to the material browser interfaces available in offline render engines like V-Ray.

For browsing materials, the plugin automatically generates folders matching content folder structure, and in-engine-rendered thumbnails of material instances.

Once selected, materials can be applied to individual meshes or multiple meshes simultaneously, with the option to apply materials to a specific Element ID.

The plugin also opens up new possibilities for version control of materials during look dev, supporting metadata tagging, and automatically identifying texture dependencies for a material.

In the initial release, support for displacement is disabled, but Rafferty says that it is in active development.

System requirements and availability
MaterialVault is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.3. Source code is available under a MIT license.

Download free Unreal Engine material browser MaterialVault from Scott Rafferty’s GitHub repo

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