Open-source material authoring software Material Maker 1.6 is out
The Material Maker Steam trailer showcases indie games created with the open-source software. Material Maker is due to become available on Steam in July 2026.
Tools developer Rod Zilla has released Material Maker 1.6, the latest version of the free node-based material authoring and 3D texture painting software.
Changes to the open-source tool include a new Controlled Variations system, for generating variant looks for materials, and Aperture nodes to help keep node graphs organized.
A simple but capable free alternative to the Substance 3D tools
First released in 2018, Material Maker is a procedural texture generator based the Godot engine.
Its workflow is reminiscent of Substance 3D Designer, Adobe’s games-industry-standard material authoring tool, enabling artists to create procedural textures via visual programming.
Users drag nodes – there are currently around 200 – from a library panel to the graph editor and wire their inputs and outputs together, with the resulting generated texture being previewed in real time on a 3D mesh.
Completed materials can be exported as PBR texture maps, with the software including export templates for Unity and Unreal Engine as well as Godot.
More recently, the software added a 3D texture painting system, along the lines of Substance 3D Painter, enabling users to paint directly onto the surface of 3D models.
Material Maker 1.6: new Controlled Variations system
Key changes in Material Maker 1.6 include the new Controlled Variations node, for automatically generating variations of the output of a material graph.
As the name suggests, it provides a controllable alternative to the existing Variations node, systematically varying up to four variables, rather than randomizing the entire seed for a node.
It can also be used in conjunction with the Iterate Variations and Layer Variations nodes to create complex patterns: one example in the release notes is arranging numbers around a dial.
Aperture nodes help keep complex node graphs clutter-free
Other new nodes include Aperture, an equivalent to Substance 3D Designer’s Portal Node.
Both make it possible to connect two points on a node graph wirelessly, cutting down the number of visible connections displayed to reduce visual clutter on complex graphs.
Other changes include a basic glTF exporter for static PBR materials, and a lot of smaller feature updates and quality-of-life improvements, listed in the online changelog.
Availability and system requirements
Material Maker 1.6 is available free for Windows, Linux and macOS. The source code is available on GitHub under an open-source MIT licence.
If you like the software, you can support development by backing it on Patreon, or you can also now wishlist it on Steam.
Download compiled versions of Material Maker for free from Rod Zilla’s itch.io page
(Includes the option to make a voluntary donation)
Read more about Material Maker in the online documentation
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