Packaging a Blender Material?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

As I experiment with making new materials, is there a way for me to save out a material (images and all) to be used later like in a material library… or even to share with the community?

Even on Blender.org, over half the links to material sharing sites are dead. Do people not share materials much?

#2

Working with nDo2, I turned this image (hopefully not copyright)…

Into this material (w/proper spec, displacement, etc.)…

pebbles_material.jpg900×506 80.3 KB

It was just a test but it came out so nice that I thought someone in the Blender community might want it.

#3

There is this that could be very close to a material library for Blender :

website :
http://shadertools.tuxfamily.org/

What ShaderTools?

* The Shader Tools is an add-on for  Blender3D.
* It’s a extension which enable you to import from a predefined materials database and to include them in your projects.
* It can create and backup your own materials or external directly in the database.
<b>* It can also export your materials and you can to share them easily.</b>

That sounds rather interesting, not sure if there are plan to get this integrated into trunk at some point or if it will stay separated.

#4

Oh wow… thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

#5

Except for these tools, how do people in general work with material libraries in Blender?

#6

Well as far as sharing materials, the last time I checked it was not up to my expectations. I would expect such a library to be able to sync with a online repository respectively share materials though such a repository (you do not want all the materials on your disk).
When I share materials (which I have never done) or textures, I put them in on BlendSwap. This is especially useful if you make theme related textures/material like wood, stone, metal, leaves, …

#7

Along with Blendswap, there is this too :
http://matrep.parastudios.de/

That currently host 651 materials, it’s not a library but Blend you download and append the material from it into your work.

I wish there was a proper material library coming with Blender, with at least a dozen of the best material people have been sharing.

#8

I never could get the shadertools thing to work. I could import the materials they had in the folder but I couldn’t make my own folder of materials… which is what I need.

It would be really cool to have an online repository of materials that people could rate and share.