Forge Material Studio vs Trumble

Forge Material Studio is a local-first tool for authoring procedural PBR materials on the web or Windows. Its node graph builds tileable materials from components such as cloud noise, Voronoi, gradients, bricks, math, blending, and normal nodes. It can also convert PNG, JPEG, or WebP albedo images into editable base-color, height, normal, roughness, metallic, and ambient-occlusion maps. A live Babylon.js preview shows materials on a sphere, cube, plane, or production-style model, with full-result and channel views. Work can be done at 512, 1024, or 2048 pixels while preserving the source aspect ratio. Projects are stored in IndexedDB with recovery, generated-map caching, undo and redo, and keyboard save shortcuts. Exports include individual PNG maps or validated .mmpack packages with baked maps, the source graph, a manifest, and an export report. The standalone viewer opens these packages in browser memory. The tool has no account system, telemetry, or material upload service. It is free under the MIT License, which permits commercial use if the copyright and license notice remain with the software.

Trumble is a browser-based creative suite for game developers and artists working on texturing and painting. Its Texture tool paints PBR textures directly onto meshes in a 3D viewport, while Paint handles 2D work on alphas, masks and channels. Bake generates normals, ambient occlusion, curvature and other maps in the browser without an offline renderer. Texture packs can be exported for Unreal, Unity, Godot and Roblox. The Texture tool accepts OBJ, STL, FBX, glTF and GLB files, and meshes need proper UVs to be paintable. The suite includes hundreds of materials and textures, and can connect to Google Drive to autosave projects there rather than using Trumble account storage. It runs in modern browsers on Windows, macOS and Linux; no account is needed to get started. The product is in early access and receives regular improvements. Free includes current tools with workspace ads; paid plans start at $5/mo, with higher tiers adding options such as no ads and early access.