Andrew Maximov shares a little project that he has been working on the last few months in Materialing. Derived from the two words “material” and “Painting”, Materialing will allow you to easily create, paint and reuse entire materials as presets, organizing and layering them ready for your texture work.
The plugin empowers You to create extremely reusable material presets and layer them for production of your unique assets
Andrew notes that Materialing simply allows you to paint with entire materials using the comfort of the familiar photoshop environment.
It is not meant by any means to be a substitute for other third party tools such as the Quixel Suite, or even Substance Painter or Substance Designer. Materialing was built long before those tools were ever around.
What Materialing does, is provide another tool in your texture workflow that offers the convenience of remaining in Photoshop by allowing you to paint and propagate edits across various layers and save out multiple maps with one click.
Using material layer masks give you the option to replace a material layer while still keeping the mask in tact. This way you can update all the textures that comprise the material quite easily. On top of that the parent material keeps track of all the assets that ever used it and if at any point in production you decide to update your source material preset * the changes can automatically be propagated across all the use-cases.
Materialing also provides the ability to tweak your material presets in your unique assets Photoshop file and your changes will be saved even if you choose to reimport or update your material preset. One of the goals of Materialing is to make re-using material so easy that everyone will do it.
Materialing can be downloaded for free, so why not give it a whirl. Andrew provided a Drive link for Materialing that contains all the necessary elements including a quick documentation – Check out the Materialing Documentation PDF here.