The latest release of MaterialX, version 1.38.7, is now available for download! MaterialX is an open standard for transfer of rich material and look-development content between applications and renderers. The latest update adds several significant features:
- New MaterialX Graph Editor developed by Emma Holthouser, an Associate Pipeline Engineer at Lucasfilm. The MaterialX Graph Editor is an example application for visualizing, creating, and editing MaterialX graphs. It utilizes the ImGui framework as well as additional ImGui extensions such as the Node Editor.
- Support for the Metal Shading Language in MaterialX shader generation and rendering, contributed by Apple. This addresses a major missing piece in MaterialX shader generation and lays the groundwork for future support for shading languages such as WGSL and HLSL.
- Support for the generalized_schlick_edf node, enabling the expression of coated emissive surfaces.
- Support for the adobergb and lin_adobergb color spaces in shader generation.
- Support for authored bitangent vectors in GLSL, selected by the hwImplicitBitangents generator option.
- uisoftmin and uisoftmax attributes added to mix nodes and IOR inputs.
- Added tangent input to the glTF PBR shading model and Clang Format step to GitHub Actions builds.
We are also very excited to announce that the latest USD release is the first to enable MaterialX support by default.
Initially developed at Lucasfilm in 2012, MaterialX is a key technology in the representation of materials in content pipelines for computer graphics. The project was released as open source in 2017 and joined the Academy Software Foundation in 2021.
MaterialX has been incorporated into widely-used applications and standards including Maya, 3ds Max, Substance Designer, Arnold, Renderman, Autodesk Standard Surface, and Universal Scene Description (USD).
Additional details are available on Github.
MaterialX Graph Editor with procedural marble example
