Materialing - Free Photoshop Material Painting - Feedback and Suggestions Thread

d1ver

Hey there guys. Today I'm happy to share with you something I did all the way back when the PBR bonanza started. It's a custom photoshop plugin for material painting.

The core pillar of Materialing is complete non-destructiveness and ease of reuse. The plugin empowers You to create extremely reusable material presets and layer them for production of your unique assets. The material layer masks are always there which gives you an option to replace a material layer at any given time while keeping the mask and automatically updating all the textures that compose a complex next gen material. On top of that the parent material keeps track of all the assets that ever used it and if at any point in production you decide to update your source material preset * the changes can automatically be propagated across all the usecases. And like that wasn't enough you are free to tweak your material presets in your unique assets .PSD(albedo hue shift for example) and your changes will be saved even if you choose to reimport or update your material preset.
Materialing aims to make reuse easy enough that people actually do it.

Here's a demo video:
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MU3M6xqhe4[/ame]
Drive link:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1zn6i0HQkjWRHRiU2VySl90Vk0
Direct download link:
http://ArtIsAVerb.info/Cerberus/MaterialingAlpha.zip
PDF Doc link:
http://ArtIsAVerb.info/Cerberus/MaterialingPhotoshopPluginGuide.pdf

I'm also sharing a small library of material presets that I hope might come in handy:

Here's a direct link:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1zn6i0HQkjWYlZHUVM1NEVYRGM


This thread here is all about the feedback, questions and suggestions you might have. So let it rip!

I'd be happy if you can find as much use for it as I did.

Thanks

---

Feature request list:

- export maps with the whole group name instead of the first letter

createdbyi

This looks fantastic. I'll be checking it out over the next week, and hopefully provide some suggestions.

Seriously though, thank you.

d1ver

Thanks Benjamin.
Sure thing, bring your suggestions forward once you have them! There are unfortunately some limitations to what photoshop can do in terms of scripting but I'm sure there's a million ways to make this better still and the real work on this is probably just beginning

Eric Chadwick

Great stuff d1ver, thanks for sharing this! I'm busy on another project but am looking forward to digging into this soon.

createdbyi

Just a quick thought (btw, I still have not installed it yet), but I am imagining a scenario where your plugin was used to make the maps and quixel's 3do viewer was used to preview them. I am not smart enough to think of a way to make that seamless. Again, just a quick thought.

cman2k

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing man!

Stromberg90

Have been thinking of something similar myself, but I don't have the technical skills to make it happen, so this is really great
Do you have any limitation on if we can use it for commercial work and so on?

Rooster128

Watched the vid, about to try this out. This could be a godsend for me, seriously. I love the automation that comes with Substance Designer, but I'd always wanted to literally paint materials in photoshop. This looks amazing!

SaboR1996

glad to see a breakdown of that. that's cool, I might have to have a look once I delve into the PBR bandwagon which hopefully is here to stay.

d1ver

Thanks for all the kind words guys! I hope you'll have no trouble getting into it.

createdbyi, that's a very interesting idea. The one problem is Materialing is absolutely free but as far as I know 3DO is still part of the quixel suite, so I don't know if I have any rights to touch that.
If they ever release it for free I'd love to look into that. But even if you preview with marmoset and I think it reloads the textures automatically. So you can just hit collapse/save hotkey in Materialing and watch it update in Marmoset.

Stromberg90, not at all man. You totally free to use this commercially!
I'd appreciate if you'd let me know what game was made using it so I can support it by buying it . And maybe a small mention in the titles would be nice, but all of that's really not necessary.
I'm just excited to see that it can help more people produce great games and art more efficiently.

I'm also welcome to anyone donating their materials for the material library, but once again that's totally voluntary.

Same here Rooster128. I love all the other tools, but there's something liberating about classic unadulterated photoshop pipeline at times.

Stromberg90

d1ver asked if I could repost this here, sent it via a pm first.

"Would be nice to be able to export maps with the whole group name instead of the first letter.

Also supporting different kind of maps like turning of the metallic map and use a specular map.

Having a collapse map and save in one button/hotkey, unless I am missing something."

If anyone agrees or not with my points, please speak up

d1ver

Thanks for the feedback man!

Stromberg90 wrote: »

Would be nice to be able to export maps with the whole group name instead of the first letter.

Yeah I actually don't see why not ^_^ I'll put on top of the feature request list.

Stromberg90 wrote: »

Also supporting different kind of maps like turning of the metallic map and use a specular map.

Oh this is totally customizeable and up to you. You can name those groups in "export" folder anything you want. You can be saving out your "ballsack" maps for all materialing cares
Just rename the groups inside of the export folder to what you see fit.

Stromberg90 wrote: »

Having a collapse map and save in one button/hotkey, unless I am missing something.

This is actually already in as a separate hotkeyable script "Materialing_Save" so you can do it in one button press. Here's where to find it:

I strongly advise to hotkey this stuff 'cause it makes for way faster workflow and photoshop is kinda buggy when you do stuff with open script windows anyway
The guide has all the info you might need on how to hotkey it.

With the buttons I just don't want to force someone to sit through a save on the rare occasion you just want to collapse, but not to save it out. That might too rare though to warrant a button. I'll have to do some more research on that one
Let me know what you think guys!

Stromberg90

Thank you, did hotkey it, but forgot after
Thinking some of the buttons in the interface could be hidden under a advanced toggle or something.

One other thing I forgot to mention, it would be nice to support more material maps.
Say I make a folder with albedo, roughness, specular, normal, glow so on.
then have it import the needed maps after what I have called my groups.

d1ver

It's totally doable. But right now it's not that far off. You can make as many maps as you want in your materials preset. All kinds literally. And then upon import they are all imported into your asset's .psd. If you don't need some you just can delete them.
And they are not part of the collapse process unless you specify that you need the glow map in the export folder.

I'll look into exporting based on the export folder when I have a moment.
Thanks for all the ideas Andreas!

EarthQuake

d1ver wrote: »

Thanks for all the kind words guys! I hope you'll have no trouble getting into it.

createdbyi, that's a very interesting idea. The one problem is Materialing is absolutely free but as far as I know 3DO is still part of the quixel suite, so I don't know if I have any rights to touch that.
If they ever release it for free I'd love to look into that. But even if you preview with marmoset and I think it reloads the textures automatically. So you can just hit collapse/save hotkey in Materialing and watch it update in Marmoset.

Yeah, Toolbag auto updates, the only limitation there is the app needs to have focus for it to update, so you'll have to click on the TB2 window to see the changes.

deolol

Seems like a cool plugin!

I'm wondering though, how would you use this for a single psd and map exporter? You know QSM (Qucik save maps) with a/r/n and others all in one psd? Does it only work with multiple psds open, like how quixel suite works?

Stromberg90

deolol: this plugin uses only one psd file, similar to what QSM does.

d1ver

Thanks for clarification EarthQuake!

Thanks for the help Stromberg90, deolol yep it totally is in one .psd.

beefaroni

Wow, I don't know how this doesn't have more than 1 page already. Nice work!! Looking forward to giving this a try next week for texturing!

monster

This looks pretty dope man! Great work.

snoops3d

Whoa Cant wait to try it out!!!

d1ver

Thank you guys, I hope you like it!