Material Designer (Beta) - Create Realistic Textures Directly in Blender

This addon is a work in progress. You may encounter bugs, if so, please report them on the discord server.

Material Designer aims to be one of the highest quality methods of creating textures in Blender. It works very similar to a software such as Adobe Substance Designer, but directly in Blender. With more than 60 custom nodes, you can effortlessly create high quality and varied textures and patterns.

Baking with Material Designer has also been streamlined and improved from the traditional baking workflow in Blender. Material Designer procedurally bakes all the textures directly inside the node editor. This way, with the pre-made camera setup, you can easily just render out the different texture maps and save them to your pc. 

Material Designer includes a lot of custom nodes. The nodes are divided into categories as such:

• Utilities : The utility category include a variety of different nodes, mainly for manipulating vector coordinates, but also nodes for combining maps as well as nodes for baking your textures.
• Textures : As the name suggests, this category includes procedural textures. It includes some of the default texture nodes in Blender that have been improved to suit a more versatile workflow. Though the main attraction of this category is the array of completely new texture nodes that allow you to create entirely new patterns and textures.
• SDFs : A Signed Distance Function (SDF), is 'a mathematical function that describes the distance from any point in space to a surface or boundary'. This might sound a bit complex, but what it essentially is, is just a mathematical function that creates a shape. With Material Designer's SDF nodes, you can easily create a lot of new and interesting shapes in Blender that would otherwise be very difficult and time-consuming to create by yourself.

With Material Designer, you can finally create high quality texture maps directly inside Blender. No need to learn an entirely new software. Now you can do it all directly inside the familiar Blender UI, while still having full control of your texture creation.

FAQ

Q: Is there any documentation?

A: Writing documentation for an addon this comprehensive is very time consuming, but I am working on it. There is a bit of documentation, just to get you started here.


Q: Who is this addon for?

A: Anyone who's interested in learning about creating PBR textures! (Although it may not be great for people who are new to Blender as it can get quite advanced.)


Q: Can you make seamless textures?

A: A stable way of procedurally making seamless textures have yet to be implemented. There's is a beta node for tiling but it may have issues. A proper method for making seamless textures is in the works. For now you can simply render your maps and make them seamless in a software like Gimp. Here's a short tutorial for anyone interested in that: https://youtu.be/DWvMpmLLggc?si=4YIuwCr5vZCFcexV