Materializer: Instant Random Materials in Blender

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Materializer test libraryThe creator of the Blender Library script, Mariano Hidalgo, did it again, a new amazing script is ready to be downloaded from his site, it’s name says it all: Materializer.

Putting it in simply words it is…

…a random material generator for materials with procedural textures. It can generate totally new materials or be used to create variations of existing ones. It’s also a fun way to explore and understand what each material setting does. Check the images below to see what the script can do.

Very easy to use, funny to try and quite useful when you need a material more charming then Blender’s default one to do a test rendering of your brand new 3D model after a long modeling session.

The script, installation instructions and a little how-to can be found here, if you need to suggest new features or report bugs then this the right place.

Have fun experimenting this one and remember to post a link in case of interesting results.

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    • joeri

      :) Very cool.
      I always try to make my materials to look like reallife materials, even in total abstract images. But this sounds like a lot of fun.

    • mthoenes

      Really cool script – may thanks for all your sripts!

    • buergi

      Wow cool scripts, thx i think you can learn much about mats and texs while you using this script. In fact the script creats better mats than me :) i’m never satisfied with my own mats :)

    • IAN R

      When I copied the script into the blender script file, it registered as a HTML file not a Python. So the materializer did not work for me. Please can somebody advise me here, I am using windows XP.Thankyou.

    • M. Esguerra

      @IAN R: Right-click on the “Materializer Script 1.0″ link and Save link as… in your scripts directory.

      This is a lot of fun! Thanks Mariano.

    • http://antidrm.org cowdude

      I could not create anything close to the samples with it.

    • jaycun

      hmmm….error “version mismatch” when using it with 2.42RC2. Complains that it is still 2.41 and that it may not work. :(

    • Mantar

      Yeah. I got that warning, too. (Of course I’m using 2.41, so I suppose I ought to!)
      The randomness on this needs some work though. If press “Go” x number of times, render something, then press “Go” x times again, I get the same result. Hitting f12 seems to restart the script and replay the same ‘random’ sequence. Two presses is getting me flat purple, four a blue-green crosshatched pattern, and so forth. Does anyone else get this kind of behavior?
      Hmm. That happens for even numbers. Odd numbers of presses will alternate between two results.
      (What I did first was turn off alpha, shader, and map to in the script, and set “Map to” to “Col”)
      Oh, and is there any way to get the preview to update by itself other than click something? Or is that not possible from a python script? (Or only 2.42?)

    • Mantar

      Okay. After fiddling with the console, I see the random number generator in my copy of 2.41 is broken! (WTF?) Very weird. I was replacing better random number generators than that in my programs a decade ago, and I didn’t have internet access then. I didn’t expect that kind of thing from the Blender team, since various working RNGs are available all over the net. Heck, the default RNG in Python works better!
      At least it’s fixed in the 2.42 RC2, but the linux binary segfaults whenever I try to render anything, which is why I haven’t been using it. I guess I’ll set some time aside to compile from source tomorrow and see what happens.

    • Dallidas

      Im having trouble installing this. i right cliccked and saved link as into the scripts folder but it doesnt add it to the list in blender after a restart of blender. Using Win XP and 2.40

    • Zxayant

      Works great in 2.41 despite ‘version mismatch’ msg.

      Very cool! And great fun to ‘play’ with. IMO randomizers can be a great creativity ‘helper’.

      Thanx Mariano!

    • http://blender-stuff.byethost32.com Mariano

      Wow.. thanks for posting the news… really aprecciated…

      For people using it.. yeah the random number generator somehow restart itself (or something like that) on each render test… weird… ill try to use another one in an upcoming version.

      Check the help (top question mark button) to some hints using the script.

      To achieve results like the screenshots you must start with a material with two or three procedurals and cool colorband settings. Read the script’s webpage or downloand a material from http:\\blender-stuff.byethost32.com to see what I mean.

      :)

    • Farmer

      If you want to use python’s random instead of blender’s cgange
      this line:
      from Blender.Mathutils import Rand
      to:
      from random import uniform as Rand

      hth :)

    • Mantar

      Farmer: Neat trick! I didn’t know you could do that in Python. Very cool. Its’ not needed, anymore though. The 2.42 RC3 doesn’t segfault on me, and the RNG is working there. It seems the problem is isolated within the 2.41 binary.

    • Tony

      When I run the script and hit the ‘Go’ button, I get the following error message:

      Traceback (most recent call last):
      File “”, line 125, in button_event
      File “”, line 293, in Randomize
      AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘getMaterials’

      Maybe I’m just not doing something correctly. I’ll keep working at it all the same. This looks pretty neat!

    • Tony

      oh… should have pointed out that I am using version 2.42.

    • Chris

      I can’t get this to work at all. The script is installed and I hit the ‘Go!’ button, but the preview just changes a little. I am certain that I am doing something wrong. I guess I am expecting something to show up in the scripts window that shows the random textures that are generated. Should I see something like the screenshots with multiple randomized textures in pretty rows and columns? Oh I am so cornfused! Thanks for your work, I wish I wasn’t such a noob that I could utilize it the way it’s meant to be.

    • Igor

      Old links doesn’t work any more. His new Blog location is here:

      http://useless-scripts.blogspot.com/