Material Nodes for Blender 2.9+

What is the Material Nodes addon?

The Material Nodes addon provides more than 40 building blocks to make your own material. You can combine these building blocks, and they are multifunctional: they can be used as shaders and masks. Therefore you can combine these building blocks to build complex materials. 

Main benefits:

• No more clutter.

• Understand your own nodes weeks later.

• Node groups are compatible with both EEVEE and Cycles. This ensures you can use your materials in both render engines.

• Make more than 100 materials in one day instead of 20.

• Gone is the tiling effect. (Unless you design tiles, of course).

• Procedural and semi-procedural workflow. Instead of using 5 textures for 1 PBR material, you can use none (fully procedural) or one diffuse or two normal maps. (There is a node group that can mix two normal maps and has a color output).

• Documentation video of 40 minutes and a pdf.

• A library of 165 materials is included.

• A lighting scene from the EV Express addon. This is a neutral scene optimized for EEVEE.

• Low RAM usage. 

For who is the Material Nodes addon?

How to install the Material Nodes Addon?

Download the .zip file called MaterialNodesV2.zip. Next, open Blender and go to Edit > Preferences > Addons. Click on Install and navigate to the .zip file you just downloaded. Click install, activate the addon, save preferences, and refresh. You can find the addon in the shader editor (n-panel).

Explanation of the nodes provided

Most nodes you can plug in right before the color socket of a (principled) shader—for Example, Albedo Variation, AO_Mix, Layer Weight, LevelCorrector, Noise, Variation, and Z.

Update: per 21-02-2020: thumbnails and more presets: 

Albedo variation:

Simple node group to add some noise. Bump, roughness and albedo can be affected. It's just a bit more pleasing to look at when modeling than the sterile basic shaders.

AO-Mix:

It is a mask, so you need this in combination with other node groups. I added more parameters so you can adjust AO values. Tip: plug it in Colors from Movies.

Bricks Colors:

Contains several color ramps with colors from bricks. You can do a lot with such color presets like these. Tip: plug in an Index Random and duplicate (Shift+x) your object.

Car Paint:

This is a shader. It has some metal flakes but still looks more like regular car paint. If you look for a more metallic look, try the Metal Flaked node group. Or you can go in the node group and adjust the color ramp that goes into the Metalic socket.

Checkers Plus.

Quite fun to work with. It is using two checker textures and an un-distorted Voronoi (which are also squares). You can combine this to get all kinds of patterns.

Color Ramp Alternative

Color Ramps are great, but we cannot plug their settings into a node-group socket. So that's why I designed this node group. By surprise, it seems even easier to use than a color ramp.

Colors Environment:

Colors From Movies:

Colors Skin:

Same as the Bricks Colors, but then with colors from the environment like soil, Fire, Sky, Clouds, etc. Plug them into a Level Correction because you will want to adjust the levels of the colors.

Dielectric Albedo Values:

Metal Albedo Values:

This is to ensure that we use plausible albedo values. It's just for reference to see if our colors (albedo values) are not way too bright or way too dark.

Distort UV:

To distort the UV if we want some imperfections in the straight-looking tiles, lines, or patterns. It looks like it distorts the texture, but it distorts the UV in the background.

Fabric:

Fabric shader. Highly adjustable.

Filter Paper:

Like the brown coffee filter paper.

Glass:

Lot's of options to make glass look the way you want. Like roughness variation, slightly bumpy, adjust colors and reflections on facing and grazing angle. Mind that in EEVEE, you need to bake first (after every change, even after changing other materials, objects, and lights). Also, in the properties panel, screen-space reflections turn on Refraction. And in the material settings (properties panel), set Blend Mode on Alpha Blend.

Golden Noise Mat.

By default, as the name says, but this node-group is very adjustable. The main thing is that it has two noise textures inside (substracted) to get another variety of noise. You can adjust the colors. Tip: plug this into a ToBPR_Channels node-group.

Index Random.

Very handy to give each object a variety of the shader. So, instead of making several similar materials for each object, you can use 1 material for all objects. Has Object Index, Material Index, and locations x, y, and z.

Layer Weight Plus:

To give a material another look at grazing angle qua hue, saturation, or value. Used sometimes for metals. Artistic look.

Leather Fake:

Sky leather shader. Not in a node-group, but nodes. In a future update, it will be a node group.

LED:

LED shader. Highly adjustable.

Level Correction:

One of my favorite node groups. I designed this node group because I was not happy with the brightness and contrast node. This is a safer way to adjust levels.

Magic Voronoi Mix:

Nodegroup gives some noise but with structure.

It could be a base for textile, paper, etc.

Mask Noise:

To mask or mix two colors or shaders. You can clamp the levels.

Mask Noise Lines:

A mask that produces those lines as you see in marble. Use it to mix colors or shaders.

Mask Musgrave Lines:

Same as previous but different look (manufactured, alien, mathematical?)

Metal Albedo Values:

This is to ensure that we use plausible albedo values. It's just for reference to see if our colors (albedo values) are not way too bright or way too dark.

Metal Flaked.

With this node group, you can make metallic-looking paint. Tip: you can type higher values in FlakeScale, like 4000. Very pleasant to use.

Mix Normal Maps.

Mix to normal Texture. For that, you need to open the node group and get other normal maps if need. (There are already two). Then by surprise, these normal maps can generate a color out of the two normal maps. Inside the node group, you can scale each normal map. That way, tiling is less obvious. And if you, on top of that, use the VarShad node group and also UV distortion, most likely no one will see any tiling effect.

Musgrave Wave Diff

Has the two procedural textures Musgrave and Wave. Most likely to be useful when making material for stones or marble. Has outputs: Color, Roughness, and Normal, which are all adjustable. (Vector output is just a throughput to reduce the clutter of noodles.

Musgrave Wave Mix.

Same as previous. Now mixing instead of difference of textures.

Noise Plus.

By default, handy to make lava-like materials, but you can use it for loads of other things.

OBJ_ID.

Quite powerful. You can use this to give each object a variation of the material. You can also make animated LEDs with this. Documentation or tutorial will follow later.

Plastic foil.

Transparent plastic. Highly adjustable. In the properties panel, under material settings, set the Blend Mode on Alpha Blend. It's like glass without refractions.

Platinum NMS v2

A lovely, ready-to-use shader. Very nice to use while modeling in Blender.

ReRoute,

Nothing special; it is just for re-routing. It's a bit cleaner than the build-in reroute in some cases.

Stucco Mat

Procedural Stucco material. You need to go inside the node and turn on randomness. I will fix it in a future update. Simple shader, good for a quick solution. Not suitable for a close-up.

Texture Mapping.

Simple but very handy and much cleaner than the build-in solution in Blender.

TileMaker1.

Fun to play with creating patterns.

Tiles 01:

Tiles 02:

To make tiles with the help of a normal map and mask/diffuse map.

Loads of parameters to make the material look more natural.

To PBR Channels.

With this, you can have one texture (diffuse) instead of a specular, roughness, metallic map, etc. Plug in a texture, and inside the node group, you adjust the color ramps. Looks way cleaner than having loads of color ramps in view.

Var V Noise, Var V Voronoi1, Variation, VarShad"

Give variety to the basic sterile-looking basic shaders. VarShad is the most advanced one which never let me down. Quite CPU intensive, though.

Vertex Col

Paint something in Vertex Paint on the material (Or use the addon tissue with curvature in Weight paint and convert it to Vertex Colors). Be sure the Vertex Colors (Col by default) have the same name as Col in the node group. You can mix colors and shaders with vertex colors.

Voronoi Wave Diff

Another node group with two procedural textures. Good for organic materials. Tip: don't use it standalone but in combination with other building blocks.

Z:

Variety in Z-axis. 

One Example:

 Below is the VarShad group node with different levels at work. On the left, you see the default principled shader. And on the right, the same shader but with the VarShad node-group plugged in.

You can submit your favorite node group, and I will check if it’s suitable to include that in future updates. This way we can help each other.

How to contact me in case you need support or have a request?

You can also send me a pm on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Newmediasupply.

Or if you are active on Blenderartists.org: https://blenderartists.org/u/Peetie.

Or visit: https://blender-addons.org/contact-us/

Update 24 July 2020 

Uploaded pdf's which are a base for the Shader Editor Course (beginners to intermediate). It counts more than 120 pages in total, and section 5 describes all the Material Nodes addon nodes. In addition, you can download the Course_ShaderEditor.zip file and unzip it. 

Update 17 July,

• Finally finished with Material Nodes Addon V5. Includes now;
• Material Nodes addon V5
• Library with 165 Materials
• An EEVEE scene with lighting and building blocks. To get familiar with the building blocks and how they look like basically.
• Documentation, PDF file
• Documentation video of 40 minutes

Update per 16 July 2020

Uploaded a library of 165 materials! The file is 165_Materials_Library.zip, and you can unzip it and use the .blend files (and thumbnails) in your Asset Manager.  Here is a breakdown of the material library:

• 16 tiles
• 05 AO
• 07 Bricks
• 05 Carpaint
• 16 Checkers
• 16 Fabric
• 06 Fake Leather
• 04 Filter Paper
• 08 Glass
• 05 LED
• 07 Marble
• 23 Metal (grids)
• 07 Mix Normal Maps
• 07 Musgrave Variation
• 07 Rubber Antislip
• 27 Surfaces  

Update per 14 July 2020

Updated to Material Nodes v5.  Huge overhaul to the node system.  Most important is that mode node groups can now be used as Shader as well as Mask. So the nodes are multifunctional. Added also more shaders like Metal Grids, Basic Skin Shader, Carpaint and many other. Soon more details, basic documentation, and a video will follow. 

Update per 12 October 2019: