Material Maker 0.93

Material Maker has been updated to 0.93, with user interface and performance improvements as well as new nodes. Please don't hesitate to report bugs and submit ideas for new features and new nodes for next releases on Github.

Here's a small video that shows the main new features of this release (you will find the full changelog below):

I would like to thank everyone who donated, contributed patches, reported bugs or suggested new features, as well as active Material Maker subreddit members who created quite a few awesome textures and materials lately.

 User interface

• The new Reference panel can be used to display images or rendered textures, and to pick colors and gradients from them. The colors and gradients can then be dragged and dropped either into a graph (to create Uniform or Colorize nodes) or into Color and Gradient parameters.
• Dropping files into Material Maker now works. Dropping a .ptex file will open it, and dropping an image file in a graph view will create an Image node.
• Inputs and outputs can now be grouped. Connecting the first port of a group to the first port of a compatible group will connect the whole group.
• The 3D preview now has a simpler choice of base meshes, but UV scale can  be configured and tesselation can be toggled.
• The 3D preview now support custom 3D meshes in Wavefront (.obj) format, and can bake object normal maps and inverse UV maps.
• Nodes now have tooltips on their titlebar, parameters and ports. Ports also have a short description, and hovering and input (resp. output) port will show the description of all input (resp. output) port.
• The UI will now prompt to confirm when closing a project tab or the application.  This behavior can be disabled in the new Preferences dialog.
• Vertical synchronization can be disabled in the new Preferences dialog.
• UI themes have been updated.
• The mouse curcor is now captures when rotating 3D previews (this was contributed by escargot-sans-gluten).
• The UI now has an FPS counter as well as a buffer renders progress bar.
• Graph selections can now be loaded from and saved to files.
• A new entry in the tools menu can be used to create a screenshot of large graphs (it automatically pans the graph to take screenshots of all parts and assembles them into a single image).

Engine

• Shader nodes now support an include section to include global functions from other shader nodes.
• The engine performance has been improved further by generating textures in parallel and taking dependencies between generated buffer into account.

New and updated nodes

•     A new Text node has been added.
• New CircleSplatter (greyscale and color) nodes have been added, to splat an input shape in circles or spiral.
• Pixelize and MakeTilable nodes have been added.
• New Repeat and CircleRepeat nodes have been added in the 2D SDF section.
• The sdAnnular shape can nos generate multiple layers.
• The Fill To Position node now has a Radial option.
• The FBM node now has a Fold parameter to fold the result in value space.
• The Transform node now has 3 choices regarding how the input is extended (clamp, repeat, extend).
• The Splatter and tiler nodes now have scale parameters to scale their input.
• The CustomUV node now accepts atlases of 4 or 16 shapes as input.
• The Voronoi node now has a Fill compatible output.
• The Material node now has a transparency channel and parameter.
• The image node automatically checks for changes in the source image file.

Bug fixes

• The very annoying bug that could prevent grabbing graph ports to connect them should now be fixed.
• A bug related to using gradient parameters in remote nodes has been fixed.