Materializer for Unity

JohnRossitter

Hi Everyone!
I started talking about this a while ago and I finally released my PBR Texturing plugin for Unity last week.
It's called Materializer and is in the Asset Store


Materializer is a fully integrated PBR Texture generation tool, that's compatible with Alloy, Lux, Jove, Skyshop and Unity 5 Standard Shader.







Demo Level Click to Play:




Youtube Swords Example

Youtube Boot Example

gsokol

So what does this do exactly? Its essentially a pack of premade materials?


Truthfully, most of your examples don't really WOW me. I think the sword video looks ok, but the demo level is a major turnoff. All of the materials read way too reflective, smooth to me.

In order for you to be able to sell this pack...your materials have to be damn good, and either they aren't, or you aren't presenting them in the best way.

As a positive, showing the materials in a webplayer is a great idea. Extremely hard to show off how well material response is with static images...and even pre-made video sometimes. So much nicer to just interact with the surfaces and see what they do. I will say though that the third person controller felt clunky, and I really wanted to be able to move my camera to observe surfaces.

JohnRossitter

Hi gsokol,

Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, that has been one of the hardest things that I'm dealing with right now, explaining what it really is.
To answer your question, no it's not a pack of materials, its a texturing toolkit not too different from dDO and Substance Designer, but runs in Unity as a plugin directly. So you work with color masking maps and define complex PBR materials for your geometry. So, you would start with a color mask for your UV space and break that up into separate material modules and apply the desired PBR materials to them individually and then perform a final merge on the set for a specific piece of geometry.

There is however a collection of pre made material swatches you can just drag and drop on your meshes if you want a quick and dirty implementation, however thats not the optimal workflow, as it will cause a lot of extra draw calls vs texture maps that have been compiled together.

I'm sorry the demos didn't wow you. The demo level was designed intentionally to be very reflective and show how the materials interact with Skyshop and reflection probes, as well as some post processing effects to give an indicator of performance, but I'm probably not telling the people playing the demo that's what they are looking at.

I believe that the materials are great, and you are probably right that the presentation isn't the best for them. I need to work on a few things mainly explaining what the tool does and how it applies to Unity users. With so much interest in PBR in Unity these days, there are not many tools available to the average Unity user to help them get their textures up to date with the various PBR workflows and shader frameworks out there.

I really appreciate your review, and will work to make the demonstrations better. This is really a cool product and there is nothing like this out there as a native Unity plugin. But it's also the initial release and obviously open to feedback.

Perhaps you have a better idea on how I could demonstrate the product?

Thanks Again!