Materializer PBR Texturing Engine for Unity

Community Showcases
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Announcing Materializer, the first native PBR Texturing plugin for Unity.

PURCHASE HERE

Materializer is a plugin for Unity that makes creating physically accurate textures for your PBR shaders simple. Packed with over 100 predefined materials ranging from metals, plastics, organics, stones, to synthetic substances like Alien Skin Materializer has something for every scene in your game. Built from the ground up Materializer is compatible with every major PBR/PBS shader framework for Unity including: Alloy, Lux, Jove, Skyshop and Unity5 Standard Shader. Dramatically reduce your draw calls with our material merger and create complex texture maps that define many materials at once.

-Use over 100 ore defined PBR Balanced materials
-Create your own PBR materials with our Developer Node
-Save Material configurations and reuse them later

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Take advantage of our low introductory offer of $45.00 which will be available until November 1st 2014.

Play a Demo Level Made With Materializer HERE

Lookout for new exotic materials to be released on the Asset Store
Check Out:
>Alloy
>Skyshop
>Lux
>Jove

  • Materializer is NOT a PBR shader framework, but rather a texture source for other PBR shaders.
    ** Materializer itself DOES NOT require Unity Pro, but all PBR shaders do because of the need for Linear Color Space
    *** Testing for Unity 5 Standard Shader is based upon the beta of Unity 5
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Highly recommended. Great company to work with, great support and awesome product!

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Here are some Screenshots from a Demo Level I made over the weekend which use Textures made with Materializer:

You can play the demo level HERE:1783425--113345--ss2.png

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New Demo

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Hi I purchased this as I think it is a great idea and your lightmixer tool is great but I have had a few issues with this. Firstly I was expecting there to be the painting tool that you demoed in one of your videos. I can’t find it, is the feature to be able to paint directly onto meshes in unity available in this version ? If not is it planned to be added ?

I would have thought that was one of the main benefits of your tool as you could paint dirt or blood onto objects in a unity scene quickly and not have to worry about draw calls. That’s something you couldn’t be able to do in an external tool as you would only be able to show one object at a time rather than work on a unity scene and you wouldn’t be able to see how it would look rendered by unity as you paint.

Also for beginners I think it would be easier for them to understand the notion of painting directly rather than having to worry about setting up maps in an external program.

Ideally when you created a new project in materializer you would have the option to add the maps like you have now but also perhaps a paint setup wizard that would just generate blank maps and allow you to start painting on the mesh.

Secondly I’m assuming the texture format in Jove 2 must have changed from Jove 1 as it doesn’t appear to look correct with Jove 2. I tested it with the free Lux package to check I was doing it correctly and it works correctly with that.

Could you please correct this, also it might be worth including a tool that can allow you to convert one texture format to another after they have been generated. For example if you used materializer to produce maps for Alloy you could then put those maps into a tool and tell it to convert them for use in Jove 2.

Also I notice that you were using the Unity 5 beta but were demoing the tool with Alloy shaders rather than Unity’s PBR ? What was the reason for this ? Does Alloy produce better results than Unity’s pbr or do they just perform a lot faster ? One of the reasons I’m interested in Jove 2 is it’s incredibly high performance. I get faster rendering performance using it with a scene with 400 lights than I do with Lux using 1 light for example in Unity 4. I think this is mainly because Unity 4 has a fairly slow deferred renderer. I was wondering how much progress Unity had made with Unity 5 on this front.

Also on the screen where you select which map to paint on does it also display maps other than just the color maps ? I painted a mesh two colors and was expecting 2 maps as a result to select from but instead had 6 with some of them being almost entirely white which wasn’t a color I had used ?

I think in general it might be better to make it easier to separate things out more. For example I think with the nodes you should separate materials from functions. For example aluminium is a material but I would consider rivet a function.

Speaking of rivet I don’t know if the package imported wrong or something but I managed to crash unity when trying to link aluminium to rivet. Unity displayed the error unable to find rivet material even though there was an icon for it in you materializer.

Thanks overal materializer looks like a very promising tool

Ian

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Hi Ian,

Thanks for all of the feedback, Let me answer some of your questions.

  1. Mesh painting.
    I had to pull that from the initial version, as it’s just too early in the development phase for it to be released.
    There is quite a lot that I still need to sort out with that feature, and I just didn’t have the time so put into it at the moment and was more concerned about getting the base product out. It is something Im coming back to in the future, but other things have taken priority such as support for all of the various PBR shaders out there.

2)Effects
The ability to layer blood and dirt etc is in there, however it’s probably not as good as it could be in this initial version.
My plan is to make the mesh painting feature more for the effects like blood and grunge.

  1. More about painting.
    One of the things that needs to happen is that I make a GPU based version of a lot of the instructions for it to be a reality. Presently it’s all done on the CPU, and as you can imagine it gets rather intensive to perform a lot of these operations on large sets of texture files.

4)Jove
I worked with the Jove 1.x framework here.
As the next version is still in it’s alpha phase, and windows only at present, I decided to hold off on the newer version.
However, Jove 1 does use the same map format as Alloy and Lux, with the exception of inverted gloss/roughness

  1. Changing Frameworks
    I think this is something that could be done. It’s on my list as well as the ability to change resolutions.

  2. Unity 5
    I played around with the Unity 5 Standard Shader in the Beta. Ultimately, and in my own personal opinion…I’m not really impressed with it. It technically produces some shiny effects and so one, but I just have a hard time really calling it a PBR shader. I think it will have appeal to the masses because how flexible it is. but the workflow for it is very counter intuitive to how most people make PBR texture sets. That being said, the maps will technically work with them, but until I see a lot of people using the Standard Shader in real life, I’m just not convinced that it’s going to take off as well as frameworks like Alloy, Jove and Lux. On the same topic, I’m not really all that impressed with the reflection probes either. I think that Skyshop does a much better job in that world.

7)Extra maps
This is probably because your source map file had antialiasing information on it, and thus creates more colors than really need to be there for proper map detection. There are some setting on the new project screen which help you tune these out.

  1. Nodes/Materials/Effects/Functions
    I agree 100% there, it’s something that I will address in the next release.

  2. Rivet
    Ahh, that was suppose to be removed from the final release as it was unstable.
    Did you install this over the beta by chance?

I appreciate your input on all of this, as you can imagine this was a massive undertaking for me and will continue to evolve over time. Please keep the feedback coming and I will keep the updates coming.

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Hi I didn’t have the beta version so I think there must be a rivet hiding somewhere in the version you submitted to the asset store.

Also with regards to painting I agree that long term gpu acceleration would be the way to go. In the mean time perhaps you could simply use the cpu with brushes that don’t need to be interactive. For example you could make a flood fill tool which would in effect be used to paint an entire mesh with one material and a stencil tool which would apply a material in the shape of the stencil texture to a position that you click to on the mesh. That way it wouldn’t matter if it took a couple of seconds for it to be applied.

Just with those two tools you would make your tool far more powerful and a lot easier for beginners to understand.

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Ian,

That sounds reasonable to me.
I’ll see what it will take to bring that feature back.
One of the main issue to contend with is user education and the level at which the can make models that are properly broken up and UVd. So maybe this could be a quick way to address the barrier to entry issues I face.

Thanks,

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Hello,

will PBR shaders require unity 5 pro or they even work in unity 5 non pro,because there is no difference in unity 5 pro vs non pro

will this work on mobile devices also without any performance issues.

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Did you ever put back the cool stuff you took out? :slight_smile: Or is this project abandoned?

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Hi there, yes it’s completely open on all versions of 5 now. Sorry for the confusion.

As far as mobile, I personally run the standard shader on mobile fine, but it’s a matter of how many textures and options you push into it. Materializer is not a shader, it just generates textures for use in shaders.

[edit]
Sorry last message was on my phone so it was a bit short.
Yes, I have had good experience running PBR on mobile, however there are some things to consider with this like, technically you can run a shader system like Alloy on Mobile, but it will drop to like 4 frame per second as its so intensive. The Unity Standard shader will run on Mobile and it will even run PBR, but you need to make sure that you are not trying to load up large textures. There is a chance that Gamma Correction will not work on many mobile devices too, as true PBR will require it.

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Well problem is that the package is so large unity will not let it grow any more

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So the painting the different parts is not in there? That is the part I want so I can make Atlases into proper PBR.

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Correct, Mesh painting is no there.

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Aww, how sad. Guess I will have to splurge for Substance Painter. Thanks for the honest response.

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Substance Painter is a great tool.
It’s a bit unstable in the last few releases for OSX though, so if you are a Mac user make sure you grab an older version from their site :slight_smile:

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Thanks. :slight_smile: Fortunately, I am using Windows.

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Oh Good, yeah all of the GPU enhancements they made for the Windows platform ended up breaking the Mac versions.

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If the only reason you can’t update it is that it is too big you could easily solve it by splitting it up into asset material packs a bit like fluvio does for its optional demos. Just remove some of the materials from the pack and then make them a free optional install as another package

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That’s True…