LigidPainter vs Material Maker

LigidPainter is free 3D texturing software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It generates seamless materials and textures for selected material channels or processes all channels automatically. Artists can paint directly on models or in a 2D scene with custom brushes, normal-map and filter painting, vectoral painting, and XYZ mirroring. Its material workflow includes albedo, roughness, metallic, normal, height, and ambient-occlusion textures, with procedural materials, PBR workflows, and node-based authoring. Projects are stored as folders, allowing saved textures to be retrieved there or exported. The itch.io listing identifies version 3.0.0 and describes the application as in development; its download page offers a 194 MB Windows 64-bit MSI. The maker’s build guide describes Windows and Unix-like builds and lists OpenAL, Freetype, and zlib as required binaries. The license permits unchanged binary redistribution with attribution but prohibits selling it and restricts source-code use.

Material Maker is an open-source tool for authoring procedural PBR materials with node graphs and exporting them for game engines and movie assets. It supports static and dynamic PBR, raymarching, and dynamic unlit materials. The official site lists more than 200 nodes; users can create nodes by combining existing ones or describing them in GLSL. Materials can be exported for Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine. Unreal requires extra steps: Unreal Engine 4 needs manual material setup, while Unreal Engine 5 uses a generated Python script that must be run in Unreal. The tool provides 2D and 3D previews, image and spritesheet export, and loading of custom OBJ models. An experimental procedural-brush feature can texture 3D models. A website library offers community materials, nodes, brushes, and environments. Material Maker runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is free through Itch.io, with a Steam plan at $14.99 as a one-time purchase. Its code uses the MIT License and assets use Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal.