When comparing Substance Painter vs Material Maker, the Slant community recommends Material Maker for most people. In the question“What are the best programs to create procedural textures?” Material Maker is ranked 2nd while Substance Painter is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Material Maker is:
Material Maker allows exporting materials ready to use in Unreal, Unity, Unity HDRP and Godot instantly.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Allows you to paint in full 3D
Since Substance Painter allows users to paint in full 3D, it can be used not only to paint full textures, but can also paint masks which can then be used in other tools (like Substance Designer) for material filter generators (like the ones used to make edge wear and dirt)
Pro Painting and procedural editing of textures
Pro One-click PBR material export to pupular game engines
Material Maker allows exporting materials ready to use in Unreal, Unity, Unity HDRP and Godot instantly.
Pro Full GPU acceleration
All the nodes are actually shaders, so Material Maker works as fast as your GPU. For complex operations like blurring a buffer is used, but you can add a buffer node yourself to further optimize the texture generation.
Pro Free as in Freedom
Open-source and completely free to use.
Pro Powerful nodes
Material Maker has a lot of interesting nodes that together allow artists to create amazing materials. You'll find many nodes similar to what Substance Designer offers.
Pro Easy to create new nodes
All nodes are made in GLSL and are editable.
Pro Inputs are functions
This means that nodes can use sub input graphs as part of their behavior to make complex stuff like raymarching or fractals.
Cons
Con Expensive and impossible to run without an expensive graphics card
The free trial is the only thing free. You'll have to pay a lot of money for the full version, and even if you do get it, you will have to pay for an expensive graphics card to use it, which means a lot more money flying out of your wallet and/or bank account.
Con Cannot export in a procedural format
You can not export substance (sbsar) files in Painter.
Con No proper funding and development
Maintained by author rodzill4 as a hobby, the project doesn't have any serious structure or long-term funding whatsoever.
Con UI needs work
Using the node editor with a very complex graph gets difficult - using node groups is recommended to mitigate this problem.
Con Export to
Con Should aim at a more professional goal
The project should consider becoming serious, and aim for not just indie but more professional users because that's the only thing can keep a project prevail.
Con Lack of learning resources
Con Lack of course or training
Given different workflow from Substance, there should be courses on different aspects.