Material Maker

• Tool
• Graphics

A program used to create shader materials. Its node-based approach allows to quickly put up some cool-looking thing. But lack of animation knobs makes it difficult to produce animations. I believe I can create custom nodes to compensate for this.

• Godot & Material Maker’s GLSL
• Can I just paste Shadertoy code directly into Global functions?
• Port groups (those blue buttons)
• Developing an iterator node for Material Maker

• You can use node’s parameters when setting its parameters. Example. There, $scale_y is set to a complicated function. And then $scale_x is set to $scale_y.
• A trick with labels - if you type a number and a : in the beginning of the label, it will position it to the according row. See Math node for example.

$time - gets time. Can be used for animating variables.

To use a parameter in your shader code it is necessary to prefix it with a dollar sign. So a foo parameter can be referred to by $foo or $(foo) in the shader code. Gradient parameters need to be used as functions with a single float parameter. So mygradient should be referred to as $mygradient($uv.x) if you want to spread the gradient on the x axis ($uv is an implicit variable used by Material Maker for UV coordinates).

$uv can have more than two dimensions. SDF nodes rely on that.

Nodes that provide random patterns have an implicit seed parameter. It is not possible to edit it directly, but moving the node in the graph will change its value. It is possible to freeze the seed value using the small dice button in the node’s title bar in the graph.

• V4->V4 takes vec4 as input and returns vec4 (while RGBA takes vec2)
• SDF3D-C is vec3->vec2 (position -> distance + color index)

The “Function” checkbox changes the way the code is generated for this input. When set to true, the input is generated as a function and can be used in the Instance functions section. If the parameter is false, the input code is inlined. It is not advised to set this parameter to true when not required, because generating functions can have an impact on performance. ^fc1fdc

In shader code, inputs are used as functions that take a single vec2 parameter. For example $myinput(2.0*$uv+vec2(0.2, 0.3)) refers to myinput, scaled and translated.

The Global functions tab is used to define the functions that are necessary to implement the texture generator. Those functions will be included only once (when the node is used of course) and cannot use parameters or inputs. This is typically where you will paste the code you prepared in Shadertoy. But they can use Instance functions! And Instance functions can take inputs.

You can use n: in Labels to set the position of a parameter. See blend node for example of that.

You can drag and drop colors everywhere!

• Creating custom shader generators
• Intro seminar to Material Maker by Paulo Falcao

When editing your custom nodes, ensure to save a copy of them, as it might break previous graphs using the older version of those nodes. I still don’t understand how your custom nodes are stored in a .ptex file. See this doc page.

Also you can’t leave comments in the Main Code section.