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Add to SafariWhen comparing MapZone 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 MapZone is ranked 9th. 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
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Resolution independent
All maps will be resolution independent because of procedural techniques which MapZone uses. So you can work at a decent resolution, resize when done and you have a higher resolution texture immediately.
Pro Map focused
MapZone focuses on maps which are the core components of any texture. Your diffuse and normal maps created with it match perfectly. And because it's not linear and all are related to each other, if the diffuse is modified then all the other maps will sync automatically.
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 Discontinued
MapZone is a discontinued procedural texture creator for windows. (Web page is discontinued but you can download from Dropbox or Google Drive.)
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.
