On the road to 1.4

It seems I have been silent about Material Maker for way too long, so here is the current status.

In the last 3 years, I committed to release a new version of Material Maker every three months, and somehow succeeded (this can easily be checked by taking a look at devlogs here on itch.io).

The upcoming 1.4 is a little bit different because it will use Godot 4, and, although I've anticipated this port by starting it 9 months ago, it is a lot more work than I thought, for several reasons. I won't go through all of them, but just mention the most important: porting to Godot 4 was a great opportunity to rewrite very important parts of Material Maker, such as the shader generator and the texture rendering system. Such huge changes will require lots of testing, and that's why there will probably be many alpha and beta releases before the final 1.4 (you can already grab dev builds on Github and test them at your own risk).

The current state of the Godot 4 port is that material authoring is mostly done (still have to optimize rendering and port a few missing options such as mipmaps for buffers etc.), and I started porting the painting tool (this one will take some time because I didn't find the best way to benefit from new Godot 4 features yet).

But since 1.4 will be late, it cannot be the 1.4 that was originally planned (some kind of 1.3 based on Godot 4 with a few easy new features and improvements), but should be worth the wait. Plus I must admit that just porting stuff and testing and fixing bugs is a little bit boring. So for a better 1.4 and my own sanity, I started adding the following new features:

• 32 bits buffers: this one is entirely made possible by new Godot 4 rendering device features, and is very useful when encountering precision problems (they can easily be seen on normal maps created from gentle slopes on high height maps)
• Smart materials: the map generator has nearly been completely rewritten, and a new "Mesh Map" node has been added to introduce those mesh-specific maps in your material graph. This makes it possible to use baked maps to introduce ambient occlusion or curvature information, or to use triplanar mapping to apply a 2D material or to apply a 3D material. The Mesh Map node rebuilds its output whenever a new model is shown in the 3D view.
  This is still under development but results are promising already (see the same material on three different meshes below).

• A new panel system: panel placement in Material Maker lacked flexibility, so new multi-window capabilities of Godot 4 were a good excuse for reworking that part. Now panels can be moved nearly wherever you want in the UI as well as undocked. This is still experimental but already works quite well (see a WIP screenshot below, with ugly placeholder icons), and when it's done I will try to make it easy to reuse in other Godot-based projects.

• A new splashscreen: I know splashscreens are annoying, but I think it might be a good excuse for showing what users can do with Material Maker. I tested something in 1.3, but it didn't look good at all, so it has been redesigned and will show randomly a material made with Material Maker, or a project where Material Maker was used (2 examples are shown below, one is a screenshot of a PBR material, and the other is an animated shader). There's also an easter egg on that splashscreen, in case you are really bored while Material Maker is loading.
  I will accept new submissions until 1.4 is released, so please don't hesitate to contact me on Discord if you want to show your work!

• Of course, Material Maker 1.4 will also have quite a few new nodes, including many new SDF nodes contributed by Theaninova and williamchange, as well as other smaller improvements.