The story of Material Nodes 

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 shader as well as masks. Therefore you can combine these building blocks to build complex materials. 

Main benefits: 

• No more clutter.
• Understand your own nodes weeks later.
• Nodegroups 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 nodegroup that can mix two normal maps and has also a color-output). 
• Documentation video of 40 minutes and a pdf. Update: included mini course "Shader Editor", see update log below. 
• A libray of 165 materials included. 
• A lighting scene from the EV Express addon. This is a neutral scene optimized for EEVEE. 
• Low RAM usage.  

If you are not familiar with nodes, you are on the right place. There will be a tutorial serie Material Nodes. Part 1 and 2 are available here: (soon more to come).

In the future there will be more nodes provided. Price of the addon will change but if you already have Material Nodes by then, the updates will be for free.   

Note: All node-groups are compatible with EEVEE as well as with Cycles. For Blender 2.82 see notes below. 

Contact

• You see on the right of this page (if you are logged in): "Ask a Question." After a click, you will see a short form, and I will get a notification. Usually, I will reply within 9 hours unless I am on holiday. 
• You can also join our Discord Server.  There you can ask questions, see all updates, and you can submit your art. 
• Or you can contact us at Twitter: @newmediasupply or @cgonfire (for technical questions).

Update per 17/09/2019 - Version 1.3:

Update Material Nodes Addon. 

Added:

• Mix Normal Maps Node-group
• Fabric Node-group
• Full Documentation in PDF.

Update per 19/09/2019 - Version 1.4:

Added: 

•  Colors Bricks. (Bucksin, Cambridge, Chateau, Dover, L200, Normandy, Orleans, Regency).  So that is 8 colorramps inside the node-group.  You can, for example, use this with a brick procedural texture. Tip: Use two times a UV distortion node. One for bigger distortion and the other one for fine. Use also the VarShad node-group to give the final texture more variety.
• Colors Environment (Soil, Coral colors, Fire, Sky, Clouds, Grass, Street Colors, Beach). Also colorramps inside.  
• Dielectric Albedo Values Unity. (Coal, Rubber, Mud, Grass, Brick, Wood, Concrete). For calibration or just use the color-presets.
•  Metal Albedo Values Unity (Gold, Brass, Copper, Iron, Platinum, Aluminium, Silver). These are color-presets.
•  Skin Colors. These are colorramps of skin colors. 
• A way better Level Correction node-groups. It's now very intuitive to adjust the levels: Lighten shadows, Darken lights, Increase Contrast, Descrease contrast.

Update per 12 October 2019:

• Option to add the shaders by using Shift+A
• AO Mix : added distance
• Albedo Variation: Vector throughput (output socket connected to the Vector input)
• Checkers Plus: Vector throughput.
• Index Random: Added: Location X, Y and Z sockets, XYZ range and XYZ Offset.
• Level Correction:  Fixed default values. Added Hue and Saturation.
• Magic-Voronoi-Mix: Fix naming, Vector throughput
• Musgrave-Wave-Diff: Vector Throughput
• Musgrave-Wave-Mix:  Vector Throughput
• Noise Plus:  Vector Throughput
• Variation:   Vector Throughput
• VarShad:     Vector Throughput
• Voronoi-Wave-Diff: Vector Throughput

In case you wonder what is the Vector throughput for; it is to have a cleaner layout.  Instead of connecting vector input sockets to the same Mapping node, you can now connect the Vectors throught.  Here an example: 

Vector Throughput

Update per 21-02-2020: 

• Huge update: the addon contains now 47 presets. 
• Big Thumbnails showing what each node group does. 
• Better roughness control for most of the node groups. 
• pre output socket. This means that put through the inner procedural texture to another node-group.

Update per 14 July 2020

Updated to Material Nodes v5.  Huge overhaul to the node system.  Most important is that mode nodegroups can now be use 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 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 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 17 July, 
Finally finished completely 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 24 July

• Added a mini course for the shader editor and a full documentation of all the nodes. It's in the course_shaderEditor.zip. You can unzip it, and in Section 5 you will find the full documentation of the course:

PDF files, mini course

Update per 4 August 2020:

There was a problem with the PlasticFoil and Color_From_Movies nodes that threw an error. The fix is in the download called  MaterialNodes_V_5_1.zip.  Best, is first to uninstall the Material Nodes addon, then restart Blender and install the new version. 

Update per 14 July 2021

• Material Nodes is compatible with Blender 2.93
• The shader node groups (most presets) have default values and work straight away. 
• There is a preset called Utilities that contain: Level Correction, IOR Flip, Index XYZ, UV Distort, ToPBRchannels, Texture mapping, Colorramp Alternative, Reroute, OBJ_ID, Colors from Movies. 
• All the nodes are accessible with Shift+A in the Shader Editor. 
• Optimized the default settings. 

Update per 22 July 2021

Quite a big update!

• Added 6 masks
• Thumbnails are back in the N-Panel. 
• Tools to preview and bake maps
• A nodegroup to mix masks. 

Update August 6, 2021

An Awesome update: The Material Presets Addon has now the full library of 165 materials. That means you can access the whole library straight in the UI. No more need to append, or to use a 3rd party asset manager. Material Nodes has its own! Thanks to Iyad who tackles this coding task.