Features
A factual tour through the shipping app: graph authoring, node families, organic assets, channels and export, photo to PBR and import, the MCP server, rendering and the application itself. Every number on this page was read out of the shipping build. Click any picture to see it at full size.
Graph authoring
A material is always a live graph of connected nodes. Change a parameter three steps back and everything downstream updates, on the GPU, while you watch it on a mesh.
The Node Library reads top to bottom the way a material grows: noise, Smart Nodes, alphas, patterns, splines, filters, combiners, utilities. Every node has a thumbnail and a description, search places a node with Enter, and categories can be filtered or hidden.
Press F1, or double click a parameter name, and the built in Reference explains it: what a node is for, what each input and output carries and what every property does, with its default and range. Search it by the effect you are after, such as cracks or roughness. It works offline and speaks all ten interface languages.
Wires from one pin fan out and route around node bodies, Clean Graph and Clean Selection sort a messy graph into aligned columns, and comment frames, reroute nodes and named Broadcast links keep large graphs readable.
Ctrl+G turns a selection into a node with its own subgraph; a double click enters it and a breadcrumb leads back. Publish exactly the sliders others should see, give copies their own values, and save a group as a reusable node. Sharing one is copying a file.
Sliders, whole number counters, switches, lists, colors, gradients and text, with generous ranges and a reset on every value. Pick a color from anywhere in the window or drag a line across the preview to build a gradient. Randomize a node, save your own presets, or render six seed variations and keep the best.
Select a Transform 2D node and move, rotate and scale its content with handles drawn right over the 2D preview. Spline nodes show their points and radius there, and linear, radial and angular gradients get handles for their position and direction. Every drag can be undone like any other edit.
Open another material beside the one you are working on and switch between them from a dropdown. Each keeps its own file, its own unsaved state and its own undo history, nodes copy from one to the other, and only the active material is evaluated, so the others cost no GPU time.
A wire that would create a loop flashes red and says so. A statistics overlay shows node count, resolution, viewport rate and frame time, branches nothing listens to cost nothing to render, and every node can be bypassed or pinned to the preview. Undo keeps 100 steps.
Drop reference photos straight onto the canvas next to the graph you are building. They stay files on your disk, the gradient picker samples colors from them, and a connected MCP client can look at the same board.
Node families
The catalog covers the whole build flow. Generators are seamless by construction, Smart Nodes deliver a believable surface from a single node, and a complete spline family and trim sheet tools cover the jobs other tools leave to bitmaps.
Real gradient noise with a lattice that wraps to the tile, so every generator tiles by construction. Base noises, cells, clouds, dirt, fibers, grain, liquids, organic surfaces, terrain and veins, from Perlin and Voronoi to Marble Veins, Erosion Flow and Water Ripples.
One node, one believable surface: Wall, Bark, Cliff, Rock, Rope, Fabric, Moss, Paint Peel, Rebar, Stick and the Stone Generator. A Kind list snaps every slider to a curated look such as klinker, birch bark, basalt or hemp, and you keep tuning from there.
19 patterns from bricks, weaves and chain link to gradients and polygons, 17 grunge layers such as edge wear, leaks, rust spots and water rings, and a Brush Stroke node with a real bristle model and six media from pencil to oil.
18 nodes, not one curve node: generate cubic, poly and circle splines, append, merge, morph and transform them, then fill, render and scatter along them, map colors, and warp or displace other inputs by the curve.
Levels, curves, gradient maps and histogram tools, six blurs including slope and non uniform blur, surface filters for normal, ambient occlusion, curvature and bevel, with normal and occlusion also from real world sizes in centimeters, and transforms that respect the tile: Make it Tile turns any input seamless, Safe Transform moves in whole tile steps.
Blend with a full mode set, or stack up to eight layers in one Layer Stack node. Tile Sampler and Tile Generator scatter a pattern with per instance randomization, flood fill treats every brick as its own region, seven warp nodes bend one input by another, including a directional warp with trails, and Trim Sheet divides the canvas into up to eight bands.
Organic assets
Procedural texturing tools are usually good at surfaces and weak at plants and hair, so artists end up buying atlases. Material Creator generates them, keeps them parametric, and gives them a real subsurface channel.
Leaf, Palmate Leaf and Feather Palm build silhouette, veins, midrib and serration in one node, with species presets from maple and begonia to coconut and date palm. Change the species, not the texture.
Grass Blade and Maize Leaf shapes for ground cover, and Moss (Smart): a clump built from domes, warped clusters and fringe shoots, with cushion, carpet and dry patch looks, a scatter mask and its own subsurface output.
Subsurface and thickness are real output channels, not an albedo trick. A dedicated Subsurface node composes the channel from thickness and tint, the viewport shows it live with an SSS strength control, and foliage and hair nodes emit it themselves.
Hair (Smart) generates loose, twisted or braided strands, and Haircard Shading turns them into a shaded card driven by an editable gradient, so hair color is a parameter and not a repaint.
Haircard Atlas packs up to 16 shaded cards into matching atlas outputs across every channel at once, and Foliage Atlas composes several leaves into one scatter ready sheet, each with its own position, scale and rotation.
Drop real meshes into a pile: Physics Scatter runs a rigid body simulation, deterministic and periodic, so stones, twigs or debris settle naturally and still tile. Import GLB, FBX or OBJ meshes, combine two baked scenes with Physics Combine, and rely on a disk cache instead of simulating again.
Cloth simulation
Simulate the form, then build the material. Padded Surface inflates cloth against a fixed edge and lets it settle, so folds, gathers and tension come from a native cloth solver instead of hand sculpted noise. You get height, masks and a normal to build the rest of the material on.
Padded Surface simulates fabric inflated by pressure inside a fixed perimeter. Stretch, shear and bend resistance act like real cloth until the surface settles, and a result that does not settle is rejected instead of passed on half finished.
Extra Fabric decides how deep the gathers run, Pressure how tight the cloth sits. Fabric Variation breaks up the symmetry, and a new seed gives each cushion its own folds while the perimeter stays exactly where it was.
Changing a setting only edits a draft. The solver runs when you press Generate, the previous result stays visible while it works, and a running job can be canceled. The finished geometry is saved in the project.
Height, Mask, Seam, Folds and Normal. The seam band marks the stitching edge without cutting into the height, the folds mask follows the concave creases, and the captured normal keeps the cloth shape under all the detail you add on top.
Width and length are set in meters and stay independent of texture resolution. Tile Size frames the capture and Height Range defines what white means, with no automatic normalization, so a cushion keeps its size and depth from material to material.
Weave, piping and stitch recesses go on top as a separate detail branch, combined with the captured normal, and ambient occlusion comes from the structure, not from single threads. The built in MCP server knows this workflow and can start, check and cancel a generation from your AI client.
Materials, channels and export
The output node is configurable, not fixed: add or remove channels, add packed maps as their own slots, choose bit depth and color space per slot, and save the whole setup as an export preset.
Albedo, roughness, normal, metallic, height, ambient occlusion, emissive, subsurface, thickness and opacity. Eight are wired from the start; emissive and thickness join when you add them to the output node.
Add ORM, the Unity HDRP Mask Map, Metallic Smoothness or a custom pack as its own output slot. Each pack knows its layout, so red, green, blue and alpha split correctly, and unwired channels get neutral fills.
64 to 4096 pixels on each axis, freely combined, so a 1024 by 2048 bark keeps its proportions through thumbnails, variations and export. Any node can inherit, scale relatively or override its resolution, with the resolved size and an upscaling warning in the interface.
Every intermediate texture is sampled with wrapping on both axes, generators tile by construction, Tile Sampler scatters across the tile, and Make it Tile rescues inputs that do not. An automated seam test guards the grunge family in every build.
Choose the file format for the export and, per slot, gray, RGB or RGBA, 8 or 16 bit, sRGB or linear. Height exports as true 16 bit so displacement does not terrace, and subsurface travels as a color channel.
Generic, Unreal, Unity, Godot, glTF and OpenPBR 1.1 set file name suffixes and the normal map convention for you; only Unreal flips the green channel. Save your own slot setup as an export preset, and an overwrite warning counts the files before anything is replaced.
Photo to PBR and import
Turn a single photo into a full material, or bring an existing .sbs graph in as real, editable nodes. Either way the result is a graph you keep building on.
Image to Material derives albedo, height, normal, roughness, metallic and ambient occlusion from one image. Its improved mode separates large forms from fine detail in the height, and controls for normal strength, roughness, saturation and the occlusion radius tune every channel. A real time derivation from image data, nothing hidden in a black box.
The De Light control pulls baked in lighting out of the photo, so a sunlit brick wall does not arrive with its shadows welded into the albedo, and the Tileable switch turns a one off photo into a tiling material, with an adjustable seam width, a soft feather and detail that survives the blend.
The derived channels feed straight into the graph. Blend procedural grunge over your photo, swap the height for a procedural one, or drive a scatter from the extracted mask. A converter hands you six files; this hands you a material you keep building on.
Import .sbs source graphs as editable nodes. Subgraphs stay enterable groups, packages with several graphs open as a pack with the primary graph already wired, ports keep meaningful names, and bitmaps and dependencies are resolved. Compiled .sbsar archives carry no graph and are declined with a clear message.
Every imported node lands in exactly one class: Faithful, Approx, Substituted or Unsupported. A report counts mapped nodes and dropped wires, markers in the canvas show where an import is not one to one, and an issue navigator jumps from problem to problem, into nested groups too.
A versioned project file holds the graph, the render settings and, embedded, the meshes and textures you linked, so a project stays portable. Saves are atomic, legacy .ts projects still open, projects from an earlier version are updated on request after the original is backed up, and files from a newer version are declined before they can replace your open work.
Built in MCP server
Material Creator ships an MCP server beside the app. Point any compatible client at it and work on the open graph by chat. No model ships with the app, nothing is hosted by BiteTheBytes, and provider, model and keys stay in your client.
A connected client lists nodes and presets, adds and connects nodes, sets parameters and resolutions, comments its work, switches between open materials, loads and saves projects and exports textures. Commands land in the graph you have open, not in a copy, and a counter shows what a client applied this session.
The evaluate, screenshot and render_image tools return pictures of a node, the viewport, the graph canvas or the whole window, and frame tools point the camera. A model can look at what it just built and correct it instead of flying blind.
Drop reference photos on a Reference Board and the client can inspect the board as a contact sheet, open single images and rebuild the look as labelled procedural stages instead of flattening the reference into a bitmap.
Set the preview mesh, camera, render settings and studio presets, add, move and delete lights, save and load lighting setups and whole shot recipes. The same controls you click in the Render workspace are there for a client.
Settings shows the server status, the path of the server binary and a client config you copy into your MCP client. The server talks over standard input and output, opens no network port, and is active while the app is open.
Material Creator holds no AI account and no API key. Which model your client talks to, a cloud service or one running on your own machine, is decided there. Projects and graphs stay local, and everything a client builds is a normal graph you keep editing by hand.
Preview, render and presentation
A live 2D preview and a real time 3D viewport sit beside the graph. The Render workspace adds studio lighting, environments, depth of field and the export of stills and turntables.
Plane, cube, cylinder and sphere, authored so materials tile and displace evenly. Height moves real vertices, a denser mesh loads for the Render workspace, a clay look appears until albedo is wired, and both previews detach into their own windows.
High quality stills at your own size and aspect, with MSAA, SSAO, accumulated samples, supersampling with a Lanczos downscale and an edge avoiding denoiser. Contrast, saturation, vignette, bloom and ACES or AgX tonemapping finish the look.
Record a turntable as a PNG sequence, an H.264 mp4, or both. Duration, rotation speed and direction belong to the video alone, Full Turn fits exactly one rotation into the clip, and the camera orbits or the object spins. Frame rate, samples, supersampling and size are yours to set, and the video encoder is fetched once on first use.
Add spot, area, point and directional lights and place them with position and rotation gizmos. Each light has a color temperature or a custom color, a size, Solo and Aim at Material. Seven lighting setups ship with the app, your own save as .mclight files, and a searchable lighting browser previews a setup before you load it.
Ten HDRIs from studio and interior to forest, sunset and night, plus a procedural studio, with rotation and intensity; your own .hdr files show up in the browser too. The backdrop is a solid color, a radial studio, the environment or a blurred environment, and the ground is a solid floor or a shadow catcher with opacity, edge fade, falloff and radius.
Perspective or orthographic projection, field of view, a composition grid and a Camera View that frames exactly what Render Image will produce. Depth of field works with a focus distance and an aperture, Focus Pivot puts the focus on the camera pivot, and Save View stores a camera in the project.
Application and platform
Written in Rust and rendered through Vulkan, without Electron and without a game engine runtime. Material Creator ships as an MSI installer for Windows on x64 and ARM64, and a universal build for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, with Linux coming soon.
The graph evaluates on the GPU with a content addressed cache, so an edit recomputes only the nodes it affects, a draft resolution keeps sliders fluid, and evaluation runs off the interface thread.
Home opens with New Material, four starter templates (Brick Wall, Grate Metal, Forest Ground and Leaf) and a searchable browser of recent materials with thumbnails. Templates load as unsaved graphs, so you cannot overwrite one by accident.
Autosave writes a sidecar on an interval you choose and never touches the original file. If the app crashes, a rescue snapshot is written in that moment and offered on the next start, and save errors name the cause: locked file, missing folder, full disk.
Dock any panel beside another, stack panels as tabs or detach them into their own windows; Graph and Render keep separate layouts, and Restore Default Layout brings everything back. Tune canvas, panels, controls, text, accent and node category colors, set the corner rounding, and export the result as a theme or a full settings profile. 18 shortcuts can be rebound; canvas gestures stay fixed.
English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, all complete, with full CJK rendering, and the built in Reference speaks every one of them. Node names stay English so tutorials and forum posts work across languages.
Check for updates in the Help menu finds, verifies and installs new releases in place on the Stable or Beta channel. F12 saves a lossless screenshot of the active window, F11 one of just the graph or the render view. Sign in once with your BiteTheBytes account: two devices per license and 14 days offline between checks.
FAQ
A node based tool for authoring procedural PBR materials. Instead of painting pixels or exporting a flat image, you build a graph, and the material stays fully editable at any time. Export the resulting PBR maps to any game engine, DCC or renderer.
Every result remains a live, tweakable node graph instead of a flat bitmap. A built in MCP server opens the live graph to your own AI client. Photo to PBR, procedural foliage, a complete haircard pipeline, physics scatter and real subsurface channels are built in. It is a native application written from scratch in Rust, and you can own it outright with a perpetual license or choose a yearly subscription.
Yes. Load any image and derive albedo, height, normal, roughness, metallic and ambient occlusion from it. A de light control removes baked in lighting from the source, and a tileable toggle makes a one off photo seamless. Because the result is a normal node in your graph, you can blend procedural detail over it, replace individual channels, or drive masks from it.
Yes. Parametric builders generate leaves, palm fronds, grass and moss, all relief based with a real subsurface output. For hair there is a full pipeline: strands become a shaded haircard, and an atlas node packs up to 16 cards across seven channels. Everything stays parametric, so changing species, braid or hair color re bakes the sheet.
No. Material Creator is built for procedural material authoring from scratch in a node graph, with a clear UI, an open MCP interface and perpetual licenses next to yearly subscriptions. Painting directly onto a 3D model is a different workflow.
Yes. Material Creator imports .sbs source graphs as editable nodes, so you can keep working on them rather than just viewing a flattened image. Fidelity varies by node, and the import is honest about it: markers in the graph and a per graph fidelity report show exactly where it is not one to one. Compiled .sbsar archives contain no graph and cannot be imported.
No AI model ships with the app, there is no built in AI subscription, and the app holds no AI account or key. You connect your own MCP compatible client; which model it uses, a cloud service or one running on your own machine, is configured there. The MCP server talks to the app locally, and your project and node graph stay on your disk.
Yes. Through the MCP server an AI client can create and modify the live graph from natural language, look at the result and keep iterating, and the outcome is a normal, editable graph you refine by hand. That last part is the point: you get a real starting graph to work from, not a locked in image, so you never depend on a model getting a material right in one shot.
The full PBR channel set: albedo, roughness, normal, metallic, height, AO, emissive, subsurface, thickness and opacity, as PNG, TGA or TIFF in 8 or 16 bit per slot, with true 16 bit height. Engine presets for Generic, Unreal, Unity, Godot, glTF and OpenPBR 1.1, channel packing, reusable export presets, seamless tileable output, render stills and turntable videos as H.264 mp4.
Windows and macOS today: a native, GPU accelerated application, delivered as an MSI installer for x64 and ARM64 on Windows and a universal Apple Silicon and Intel build on macOS, with Linux coming soon.
Ten: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, with full CJK font support. Node names stay English so tutorials work in every language.
Yes. F1 opens the built in Reference, and a double click on a parameter name jumps straight to that parameter. It explains every node and property with its inputs, outputs, defaults and ranges, can be searched by the effect you are after, works offline and is available in all ten interface languages.
Yes. Check for updates in the Help menu looks for a new release on the Stable or Beta channel, verifies its signature and installs it in place. The automatic check can be switched off.
Yes. Tileability is first class: generators wrap seamlessly, there is a tile sampler, and a make it tile filter turns any non tiling input seamless.
Node based, procedural, from scratch graph authoring. Painting textures directly onto a 3D model is a different workflow.
No. Material Creator uses the same licensing model as every BiteTheBytes desktop product: perpetual licenses you buy once and keep forever, with yearly subscriptions as an option for those who prefer flexibility. You are never forced into a subscription.
A perpetual license is a one time purchase that includes 12 months of updates. After that window your version keeps working for life. Whenever you want another year of updates, you can add a maintenance extension, even much later.
The feature set is identical. Individual is for one person using the software on their own, up to USD 200,000 annual revenue from work created with it. Company adds team seat pool management, an additional manager role, offline licenses and priority support, and is required as soon as more than one person uses the software or revenue exceeds that limit.
Each seat allows 2 active devices at the same time. You can switch devices yourself in the customer portal or directly in the app by freeing one of the existing devices, which makes the slot available immediately. This works once every 7 days per seat; if a device was lost or broke, our support frees it for you.
Yes. Subscriptions can be cancelled any time in the customer portal and simply run until the end of the paid period. If you would rather stop renting altogether, you can buy a perpetual license instead.