MaterialCreator

A free, open-source, native node-based procedural material authoring tool, built in Rust.

Connect nodes — noises, patterns, filters, blends — into a graph that outputs a seamless, tileable PBR texture set, previews it live in 2D and 3D, and exports maps ready for Blender and Unreal Engine.

Status: early development (v0.1, pre-release). New to the workspace? See the navigation/shortcuts reference for your OS: macOS · Windows · Linux.

Features

• Real-time GPU node graph. Every node is a WGSL compute shader; editing a param or rewiring a connection re-evaluates only what's downstream and dirty, live.
• Live 2D and 3D preview. The 2D view shows any selected node's output at full resolution, with tiling and single-channel views. The 3D view renders the graph's output maps on a sphere, cube, plane, rounded cube, or rounded cylinder under a GGX metallic-roughness PBR shader, with real per-vertex tangents and height-driven displacement on every mesh — not just a flat plane. The Environment panel lets you pick between 4 bundled CC0 HDRIs (Poly Haven) for the sky and reflections, or load your own .hdr/.exr file, to see how a material reads under a different lighting mood — a small tonemapped preview of the active HDRI shows right under the picker. Channel textures get a real generated mip chain and 16x anisotropic filtering, with an Unlit Base Color debug mode, an Exposure slider, and a Pixel/Nearest filtering toggle for inspecting dither/pixel-art materials crisply. The Alpha output channel drives real transparency in the preview, not just an exported mask.
• Seamless tiling, guaranteed — with an escape hatch. Every generator is periodic and every filter samples with wrap-around addressing by default; each node ships with its own automated tiling test. Nodes that read past a tile's edge (an offset, a blur, a noise lattice, ...) also expose a per-axis Tiling Mode, for the times you want that edge to clip instead of wrap. Resolution-independent by design — a graph looks the same at 512px and 4096px, detail aside.
• Deterministic. Same graph, same seed, same pixels — every time, on the same GPU.
• A custom node-graph canvas — pan, zoom (including trackpad pinch-to-zoom, working anywhere on the canvas), box-select, duplicate, undo/redo, and a category-colored, alphabetically-sorted, keyboard-navigable (arrow keys + Enter) searchable add-node menu — built directly on top of the UI toolkit's own primitives rather than a third-party graph widget. Every node card is color-coded by category, matching a dedicated Node Library panel along the canvas's left edge for browsing and adding nodes by icon. New nodes always land wherever you last clicked on the canvas.
• Crash-safe autosave and error toasts. The current graph is snapshotted to a recovery file every 30 seconds; if MaterialCreator doesn't shut down cleanly, the next launch offers to restore it. Failed opens/saves and graph evaluation errors surface as a dismissable notification instead of only reaching the terminal log.
• Export to PNG (8-bit and 16-bit) and 32-bit float EXR, at resolutions from 256px up to 4096px (8192px where VRAM allows), with ready-made naming presets for Blender and for Unreal Engine (including an ORM-packed texture: AO/Roughness/Metallic in one file).
• Save/load as a human-readable, versioned .mcgraph JSON file.

Nodes

40 nodes, each with its own tiling and determinism tests.

Generators — Noise

• Perlin Noise — classic gradient noise, smooth and organic.
• Simplex Noise — gradient noise on a triangular lattice, fewer directional artifacts than Perlin.
• Voronoi — cellular noise: distances to a scattered set of points (F1, F2, F2−F1, edges).
• White Noise — fully uncorrelated random cells, no interpolation.
• Fractal Sum — several octaves of a chosen base noise, summed (fBm).
• Clouds — an fBm preset tuned for a cloud-like look.

Generators — Patterns

• Pattern Generator — a brick or grid pattern, with gap, edge darkening (a flat luminance fade toward the gap), and per-tile size/rotation/luminance jitter.
• Shape — a disc, square, polygon, star, or leaf, centered in the tile. The star and leaf are original constructions, not smoothed approximations: the star's points are exact straight edges that can "unfold" a plain polygon into a star via one setting, and the leaf is a single continuous curve with independently shapeable top, middle, and bottom curvature, plus control over where its widest point sits.
• Gradient Linear — a ramp from black to white, rotatable in quarter turns.
• Gradient Radial — a ramp from the center outward to a given radius.
• Checker — an alternating black/white grid.
• Uniform Color — a flat, solid color fill.
• Dither Pattern — a Bayer, blue noise, or halftone dot mask, for use in Blend, Threshold, and similar nodes.

Filters — Adjustments

• Levels — remap an input/output range, with a gamma curve in between.
• Curve — a 5-point adjustable response curve.
• Invert and Clamp — the usual tone-mapping building blocks.
• HSL Adjust — shift hue, scale saturation, shift lightness.
• Gradient Map — map a grayscale input through a color gradient.
• Grayscale Conversion — Color to Gray by luminance.

Filters — Blending & Masking

• Blend — 9 blend modes (Copy, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Max, Min, Difference), opacity, and an optional mask.
• Value Range — threshold/window an input around a position.
• Threshold — a hard black/white cutoff at a given value.

Filters — Stylize

• Ordered Dither — reduce an image to a few tones with a Bayer or blue noise dither pattern; Per Channel or hue-preserving Luminance mode.
• Palette Dither — dither a Color image down to a 2–8 color palette, with RGB or perceptual (luminance-weighted) nearest-color matching.

Filters — Glitch

• Block Shift — seeded random blocks shift sideways.
• Channel Split — sample each RGB channel at its own offset, for a chromatic-aberration look.
• Scanline Jitter — seeded random horizontal or vertical bands shift sideways.
• Data Corrupt — posterize, channel-swap, or invert random blocks for a "corrupted file" look.

Filters — Spatial

• Blur and Directional Blur — separable Gaussian blur, omnidirectional or along one fixed angle.
• Warp and Push Warp — distort an input by the gradient of an intensity map, omnidirectional or along a fixed angle.
• Flow Blur — blur along a control map's own gradient, strength scaled by its steepness.
• Transform 2D — offset, rotate, scale, and flip horizontal/vertical, with wrap-around tiling.
• Edge Detect — highlight where an input changes sharply.
• Bevel — rounds a mask or height input's edges into a beveled height map, with a Convexity control from a plain chamfer through a rounded dome to a concave scoop. Chain into Height to Normal for the usual beveled-edge normal look.

Converters

• Height to Normal — a tangent-space normal map from a height map, Sobel-based, with an OpenGL/DirectX toggle.
• Height to AO — a screen-space-style ambient occlusion pass from height.
• Curvature from Normal — convex edges read bright, concave crevices read dark.

Outputs

One pass-through marker node per PBR channel: Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, Height, Ambient Occlusion, Emissive, Alpha. Alpha drives real transparency in the 3D preview (not just an exported mask) and exports as its own standalone grayscale map.

Building from source

Requires a stable Rust toolchain (rustup.rs) and a GPU with a Vulkan/Metal/DX12 driver (wgpu's supported backends — no OpenGL fallback).

• macOS: install the Xcode Command Line Tools if you haven't already (xcode-select --install). No other setup needed; wgpu uses Metal.
• Windows: rustup's default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain is enough; it prompts to install the Visual Studio Build Tools (the "Desktop development with C++" workload) the first time you build if they're missing. wgpu uses DX12.
• Linux: wgpu uses Vulkan, so you need a Vulkan-capable driver (Mesa's RADV/ANV on AMD/Intel, or the proprietary driver on Nvidia) plus your distro's windowing dev packages — on Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libxkbcommon-dev libx11-dev libwayland-dev mesa-vulkan-drivers.

cargo run -p mc_app   # launch the desktop app
cargo run -p mc_cli   # headless: regenerates the bundled example graphs and exports into ./out

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md — short version: sign off your commits (git commit -s), keep cargo fmt/cargo clippy/cargo test clean, and don't submit anything derived from Adobe Substance.

License

Dual-licensed under either of:

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)
• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)

at your option.

Inspiration

MaterialCreator is an independent implementation, built from scratch for this project. It does not use, reference, or reproduce any other procedural texturing tool's code, file formats, trademarked names, or UI design — generic, industry-standard terms for node types (Levels, Blend, Blur, Height to Normal, and so on) are the only overlap you should ever find with any other tool in this space.

Its broader motivation — that ambitious, professional-grade creative software is worth building in the open, for artists — takes a cue from ArtCraft, an open-source creative tool for artists and filmmakers.

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MaterialCreator is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Adobe. Adobe and Adobe Substance 3D are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.