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, Unreal Engine, and Painter.

Status: v0.2 — second public 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, Unreal Engine (including an ORM-packed texture: AO/Roughness/Metallic in one file), and Painter (one plain, unpacked image per channel into its own folder, plus a README pointing each file at its fill-layer slot — never packs channels, unlike the other two presets).

• Save/load as a human-readable, versioned .mcgraph JSON file.

Nodes

66 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.
• Anisotropic Noise — directional, stretched noise for brushed-metal/wood-grain streaks.
• Gabor Noise — oriented, band-limited noise for fine, controllable grain/fabric-like texture.
• Streaks — scattered directional streak strokes, for scratches and fine fibrous detail.

Generators — Patterns

• Pattern Generator — a brick or grid pattern, with gap, edge darkening (a flat luminance fade toward the gap), per-tile size/rotation/luminance jitter, and an optional connected Shape to stamp instead of the built-in tile.
• 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.
• Circular Pattern — shapes or noise arranged radially around a center, for dials, gears, and radial ornament.
• 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.
• Image Import — bring in your own PNG/JPEG/EXR as a node input.
• Dither Pattern — a Bayer, blue noise, or halftone dot mask, for use in Blend, Threshold, and similar nodes.
• Type — render real text from any installed font, for embossed/engraved labels and embroidery-style graphs.
• Panel Layout — a seamless, tileable guillotine subdivision into armor/hard-surface panels, with per-panel SDF, ID, and a fastener placement path — no flood fill, so no seams at the tile edge.
• Fabric Generator — Plain Weave, Twill, Rib Knit, or Stockinette cloth structure, with an optional Thread input for a custom fiber shape and its own Ply ID output for coloring individual plies.
• Thread — genuine plied-yarn geometry: round tube plies on a helical centerline, with a real top-surface-height occlusion test deciding which ply shows where (not a blend). Outputs Height, Ply ID (for per-ply coloring via Gradient Map), Fiber (groove detail), and Mask.
• Knit — a single-ply stockinette/rib knit loop structure, independent of the Fabric Generator + Thread combination above.
• Stitch — a repeating hand/machine-stitch mark pattern along a Path.

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.
• Outline — traces a line along real contrast or identity boundaries, with its own independent width, rounding and softness — Contrast mode for an ordinary brightness edge, Label mode for an exact-identity boundary (e.g. Distance's own Cell ID output) that a brightness-based detector can't see.
• 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.
• Distance — spreads an optional Source's value outward from a Mask, fading to zero past a set Distance (dirt pooling near seams, decay radiating from damage); Source defaults to the Mask's own value when left unconnected.

Generators — Path

• Path — an authored or procedural vector path, the shared input every node below builds on.
• Image Trace — extract a path from an image's own edges.
• Path Simplify — reduce a path's point count while preserving its shape.
• Path to Mask and Path to SDF — rasterize a path to a filled mask or an exact signed distance field.
• Fasteners — rivets, bolts, or screws placed evenly along a path in 6 head shapes, seated on an optional base height.

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.
• Distance Field — an exact signed distance field from any mask's own edge, not a blurred approximation.
• Shape Boolean — union/subtract/intersect two SDFs with a real boolean, in 5 edge-blend modes (hard, smooth, round, chamfer, groove).
• Redistance — rebuilds an exact distance field from any SDF's zero contour, erasing the hidden internal seams a boolean or warp can otherwise leave for a later Bevel to expose.
• Bevel Profile — shapes an exact SDF into a real height map through a chosen edge profile (flat, round, chamfer), instead of the usual blur-then-curve-then-histogram approximation.
• Edge Wear — chipped-paint wear on convex edges and a cavity mask for dirt/recesses, from an SDF (exact) or a height map (curvature-estimated) fallback.
• Channel Packer — pack up to 4 grayscale inputs into one RGBA texture's own channels.

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), your distro's windowing dev packages, and fontconfig (the Type node's own font search) — on Debian/Ubuntu: apt install libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libwayland-dev mesa-vulkan-drivers libfontconfig1-dev. (libxkbcommon-x11-dev/libxcursor-dev/libxi-dev are easy to miss and don't get pulled in by the rest — confirmed by actually running a packaged build on a bare Ubuntu container with only a shorter, previously-documented set installed: missing libxkbcommon-x11 crashed with a real panic/backtrace, not just a clean error, the first time winit tried to set up its X11 keyboard handling.)

  Downloaded the prebuilt release instead of building from source, and it won't start at all (a terminal window flashing a "cannot open shared object file" error or a Rust panic, or nothing visible happening when you double-click it)? You're very likely missing one of the runtime libraries above — install the runtime package names instead of their -dev counterparts: apt install libxkbcommon0 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libx11-6 libxcursor1 libxi6 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 mesa-vulkan-drivers libfontconfig1, then try again. Most desktop Linux installs already have all of these; this mainly comes up on a minimal/server-style install.

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

# headless: render any single saved graph file
cargo run -p mc_cli -- render path/to/material.mcgraph --preset blender --out ./out

# render N independent re-rolls of the graph's own Seed params, for
# quickly previewing how its jitter/seed-driven look varies
cargo run -p mc_cli -- render path/to/material.mcgraph --preset blender --out ./out --variations 5

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.

---

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.