Absolutely not! These materials can be controlled and customized through easy-to-use node groups that behave similarly to the Principled BSDF shader that comes with Blender. You can customize the materials by just experimenting with the sliders, colors, and values that are exposed through these node groups without worrying about complicated node networks.

Of course, if you want to learn more about how these materials are built, you can dive into the node groups to see the full node networks that these materials are built on.

Definitely! While the materials, themselves, only work in Blender, you can take advantage of Blender's built-in texture baking functionality to bake textures, normal maps, and displacement maps that can then be used in the same manner that you would use any image-based texture in your favorite game engine.

These materials perform well on a variety of GPU-based systems, but the shaders tend to render much more slowly on CPUs compared to simple materials. This is particularly true of our most demanding material, the scaley alien skin. We recommend using a system with an GeForce RTX 2060 or better, which is the lowest-end GPU we have tested these materials on. Please take a look at our performance benchmarks for different CPUs and GPUs to get a better sense for how these materials will perform on your system. If you are concerned, please try out the free-tier of this product, which includes the "Alien Eggs" procedural material in its fully-featured form.

Yes, these materials work with both Cycles and Eevee. However, the materials work best in Cycles for the following reasons:

• Cycles supports actual displacement in shaders, rather than just faking the displacement through bump mapping. The result is far more believable materials in Cycles. 
• In our hands, using Cycles tends to deliver better performance than Eevee for some of the materials. The large shader networks used under the hood seem to be better handled by the Cycles engine.

Please take a look at our "Documentation" page for details on getting started, including a video tutorial. This product is easy-to-use, the same way that you would use any Blender shader, and materials can be customized using simple node groups that can be controlled similar to the Principled BSDF. You can either append the materials from the .blend file distributed with the product, or drop the .blend file directly into your asset browser library folder to use the materials directly from the asset browser.

The procedural materials only work in Blender. They are built from Blender's shader nodes. However, you can use these materials to generate textures that can be used in other software by using Blender's built-in baking system.