Pigmi vs Surface Labs

Pigmi is a desktop editor for texture palettes, gradient atlases, and PBR material maps. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with a Free plan priced at free. Gradient tools include linear, radial, and conic forms, stepped rows and columns, RGB or HSL interpolation, editable color stops, and opacity. Palette elements can sit in nested folders and support multi-selection, ordering, visibility, isolation, copy and paste, plus name search. Material controls cover albedo, roughness, metallic, emission, clearcoat, and clearcoat roughness. Enabled maps export as PNG or WebP, and Pigmi can create a packed MRC map while synchronizing document edits with exports. Palette generation uses Huemint and preserves locked stops. Optional Blender add-ons handle palette UV mapping, vertex-color painting, and mesh attachments. A local STDIO MCP adapter supports compatible AI clients and requires Node.js. Editing and exporting are local; generation sends constraints to Huemint.

Surface Labs is a node-based application for building procedural textures and materials by connecting operations in a graph. Its node library includes generators, filters, blends, transforms, normals, channel operations, and math nodes. A GLSL editor supports custom nodes that compile to the native Rust engine; the maker says most nodes render in under 2 ms. Desktop authoring supports up to 8192 × 8192 in 32-bit float, while iPadOS and Android are capped at 4096 × 4096. A headless command-line tool can evaluate graphs and export textures for batch work and CI. The built-in MCP server lets compatible assistants inspect and edit projects, render nodes, and export textures. It is opt-in, binds to loopback, requires a generated token, and rejects non-local Origins, but file arguments can access files available to the user account rather than staying within a project directory. A portable project file bundles materials, subgraphs, images, fonts, a preview model, and export settings. Surface Labs is free while in early access; its iPad build is distributed through TestFlight, where builds expire on the usual 90-day cycle.