# Material Maker: Procedural Textures and 3D Painting on the Godot Engine > Material Maker is an MIT-licensed node-graph texture authoring and 3D painting tool built on Godot Engine, distributed through itch.io, Steam, Scoop, Chocolatey and Homebrew. It replaces Substance Designer for teams that want an open source graph editor, but it is a desktop application, not a service. **RodZill4/material-maker** — A procedural textures authoring and 3D model painting tool based on the Godot game engine - Repository: https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker - Stars: 5,955 · Forks: 379 - Language: GDScript - License: MIT - Published: 2026-09-22 · Updated: 2026-09-22 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/rodzill4-material-maker ## What Material Maker solves, and who is meant to use it Texture authoring splits into two jobs: generating tiling surface maps procedurally, and painting directly onto a 3D model. Material Maker does both in one Godot-based desktop application. Its user interface is built on Godot's GraphEdit node, so a texture or a brush is described as a set of interconnected nodes rather than as a stack of layers or a bitmap you paint by hand. The audience is narrower than the tagline suggests. This is for people who already think in node graphs: technical artists, indie game developers producing their own material libraries, and anyone who wants texture output to be reproducible rather than hand-painted. If your workflow is Photoshop-style painting on flat images, the graph is an obstacle, not a feature. The README frames the tool as one that can "create textures procedurally and paint 3D models", and the painting half is the reason to consider it over a pure generator: the same application covers both the graph and the brush. The licence is the other part of the pitch. Files in the repository are under MIT unless otherwise specified, with copyright held by Rodolphe Suescun and contributors. For a studio that cannot ship a proprietary node-based texture tool into its pipeline, that is the deciding constraint, not the feature list. ## How the node graph and the Godot base fit together The architecture is visible from the repository layout rather than from the README. The top level holds project.godot, default_env.tres, export_presets.cfg and start.tscn, which is what a Godot project looks like. Material Maker is not a library you import into another engine; it is a Godot application whose editor UI is the product. The material_maker/ directory carries the application code in GDScript, addons/ holds Godot addons, and demo/ contains demo.tscn and object.tscn as example scenes. That choice has consequences. Because the graph editor is Godot's GraphEdit, node interaction, zooming and connection behaviour follow the engine rather than a bespoke UI toolkit. Because the implementation language is GDScript, the shader work that ends up on the GPU is GLSL, which is one of the repository topics. The tool is therefore a GDScript front end driving shader nodes, with the exported result being texture maps rather than a runtime dependency. A practical implication: nothing about the graph is a service. There is no server component and no account. Your materials live in local project files, and the demo scenes in the repository are the reference for how a scene is put together. The README does not document a headless or command-line batch mode, so the assumption is interactive authoring. ## Installing Material Maker and opening the demo scene The README lists packaged installs rather than a build-from-source path as the primary route. On Windows, Scoop is one option. The README gives this example: ```text scoop bucket add extras scoop install material-maker ``` Chocolatey is the alternative on the same platform, with a separate package name for the portable install: ```text choco install material-maker ``` ```text choco install material-maker.portable ``` On macOS, Homebrew is the documented channel: ```text brew install material-maker ``` If you prefer a storefront or a direct download, the README points to itch.io and Steam. Those are the two links it gives for getting the application outside a package manager. For a first real use, the repository ships example scenes. Open demo/demo.tscn and demo/object.tscn from the project to see how a graph and a painted object are structured. The README does not walk through the editor, so the user manual at the documentation site is where the node-by-node explanation lives. Translations are installed from the Preferences dialog using its Install button, and the README links a Chinese translation file as an example. If you want a build newer than the latest release, the README notes that automated builds from the master branch are available and explicitly says to use them at your own risk. ## Where Material Maker is the wrong tool The most concrete limitation is distribution. Material Maker is a desktop application. It is not a web service, and the README documents no online or browser version. If your team needs to hand a material graph to someone who cannot install software, or to run authoring on a tablet, this is not the project for that. The related searches show people asking about an iPad build and an online version; neither appears in the README, so treat both as unsupported. The second limitation is integration. There is no documented Unity plugin, Blender addon or other in-engine bridge. The output is texture maps, and the consuming engine is your problem. If you expected the graph to live inside your 3D application and re-evaluate there, Material Maker does not work that way. The third is release cadence versus stability. The README offers master-branch automated builds but labels them as something to use at your own risk. That is an honest boundary: the tagged releases (1.7, 1.6, 1.5p1) are the supported artefacts, and the development builds are not. There is also no rollback procedure documented in the README, so if a new release changes a graph's behaviour you should keep the previous version's installer yourself. ## Material Maker versus Substance Designer and a Blender workflow The comparison people search for is Material Maker versus Substance Designer. The difference is not the node graph; both are node-based procedural texture authoring tools. The difference is licensing and distribution. Substance Designer is a commercial product from Adobe. Material Maker is MIT-licensed, with copyright held by Rodolphe Suescun and contributors, and it is distributed through itch.io, Steam, Scoop, Chocolatey and Homebrew. For a studio that cannot put a proprietary authoring tool in its pipeline, or that wants to inspect and modify the tool itself, that is the whole argument. The Blender comparison is a different axis. Blender's shader node editor is a render-time material system: the graph is evaluated by the renderer and generally stays inside Blender. Material Maker is an authoring application that produces texture maps you export and then feed into whatever engine you use. If you want the graph to be the material, Blender is the natural home. If you want baked, reusable texture output that a game engine consumes, Material Maker's model fits better. The repository's GDScript and GLSL topics also mean the shader node work is inspectable in a way a closed editor's is not. ## Maintenance, upgrade cost and what the MIT licence means here The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-09-20. Releases have been arriving at a steady pace: 1.7 on 2026-07-14, 1.6 on 2026-04-18 and 1.5p1 on 2026-02-14. That pattern matters for upgrade cost, because a node graph tool changes its node set between versions, and every graph you have built is a file that has to keep opening. Upgrade cost is therefore mostly re-verification, not migration scripting. There is no documented migration tool in the README, and no documented rollback. The practical approach is to keep the installer for the release you are on and open your existing graphs in the new version before committing the team to it. The CHANGELOG.md at the repository root is the place to read what changed between releases; the README does not summarise it. On licensing, the README states that files in the repository are under MIT unless otherwise specified, and points to LICENSE.md for details. That is permissive and permits commercial use and modification, but the README's own wording leaves room for files that are not MIT, so anything you redistribute should be checked against LICENSE.md rather than assumed. This is a description of what the repository says, not legal advice. ## Conclusion Adopt Material Maker if you author tiling textures or paint 3D models and want an MIT-licensed node graph that runs on your own machine. Skip it if you need a browser tool, an iPad build, or a plugin that lives inside Unity or Blender, since none of those are documented here. Verify first that your platform is covered by the download channels listed in the README and that your target engine can consume the exported texture maps. ## FAQ ### Is Material Maker open source? Yes. The README states that files in the repository are licensed under the MIT license unless otherwise specified, with copyright held by Rodolphe Suescun and contributors, and points to LICENSE.md for more information. ### How do I install Material Maker? The README documents packaged installs: Scoop and Chocolatey on Windows, Homebrew on macOS, and downloads through itch.io or Steam. There is no build-from-source instruction in the README. ### Is Material Maker free? The repository is MIT licensed, so the source is available under a permissive licence. The README also lists itch.io and Steam as download channels, and it does not describe pricing on either storefront. ### How do I use Material Maker with Blender? The README does not document a Blender addon or integration. Material Maker is a Godot-based desktop application that produces textures, so the connection to Blender is through the texture maps you export rather than a plugin. ### What is Material Maker? It is a tool based on Godot Engine for creating textures procedurally and painting 3D models, with a user interface built on Godot's GraphEdit node so textures and brushes are described as interconnected nodes. ## Sources - [Issues](https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker/issues) - [License: MIT](https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker/blob/master/LICENSE) - [README](https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker/blob/master/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker/releases) - [RodZill4/material-maker on GitHub](https://github.com/RodZill4/material-maker) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/rodzill4-material-maker