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Add to SafariWhen comparing Substance Designer 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 Designer is ranked 8th. 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 Native integration with many game engines
It has the ability to export sbsar files, these can be put into most game engines allowing in engine tweaking of procedural content.
Pro Ability to create custom substance files
Substance designer allows users to create custom substance files, it offers a lot of power with a mix of workflow of working with procedural textures and bitmaps.
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
The pricing starts at $20 for the indie license and $100 for the pro license.
Con Not good for painting textures
Substance designer is not very powerful when it comes to painting textures, while there are 2D painting tools, they are not very good.
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.
